As the Biden administration attempts to clear overcrowded border facilities, more than 70 planes carrying migrants from the southern border to Jacksonville, Florida, landed in the middle of the night in recent months, according to the office of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.
The Washington Examiner reports that this is the first time since the summer that Florida has revealed the number of verified planes arriving in the state.
According to one official, the governor’s office has been scrambling in recent weeks to figure out who is enabling the daily mystery planes landing in northern Florida, but the Biden administration has declined to release any information.
Larry Keefe, DeSantis’ public safety czar, stated, “Over 70 air charter flights [on] jetliner airliners coming from the southwest border have landed at Jacksonville International Airport. On average, there’s 36 passengers on each of these flights. And that has been going on over the course of the summer through September.”
Additionally, Keefe explained, “We’re in a sad situation of trying to run an investigation. Who is facilitating this travel? How are they getting here? Who are the support people? Who are the sponsors?”
Keefe, who was Trump’s U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Florida until early 2021, claims that The Departments of Justice, Homeland Security, and Health and Human Services will not tell the state of Florida who is coordinating the flights. They also will not give the names of those on the flights, or where the migrants are being taken.
Keefe said, “We don’t know definitively or specifically as to why Jacksonville is the chosen place. [We’re] having to watch and observe — in effect, spy on the government to see what it is that they’re doing in the middle of the night out of these airport facilities.”
Officials in Florida are aware that the migrants being flown into the are then moved north and south on I-95 by charter bus. Florida has increased its surveillance of flights entering the state following an incident involving a 24-year-old Honduran man posing as a minor who was arrested for murder.
In October, reports revealed that similar early morning flights landed in Westchester, New York, all summer, and migrants were transported throughout the state.
