The Blood-Boiling Case of Immigrants Being Tricked to Go to California

 Those flying migrants from Texas to California might not be guilty of human trafficking, but they could be charged with kidnapping and fraudulent misrepresentation.

  Legally, human trafficking means you transport someone to exploit them for labor or sex. Florida Gov. DeSantis's workers are not doing that.

  Kidnapping, though, requires only that you take someone by force or deception. The news stories say those transporting the migrants to California are promising them employment and, in some cases, to get them to where they need to be -- to their family members already here or to jobs in Iowa, South Carolina or wherever. If the DeSantis workers are purposefully transporting people away from their desired destinations, or making promises of employment they have no intention of providing, then that is kidnapping.

  Fraudulent misrepresentation arises when you seek to obtain benefit through making misrepresentations. Promises to get them jobs and to the their desired destinations fall in this category, as well. The benefit to the abductors? It might not be financial, but the human-movers clearly want them moved. To them it would be beneficial. They perceive a benefit, or they wouldn't be doing it.

  While DeSantis's workers might be guilty of these two crimes, each case of abduction should be looked at on its own merits. The migrants are ending up in California, a place much more friendly to immigrant and needy than is Texas, where DeSantis's workers are picking them up. (In creating a Florida State office empowered to relocate migrants, DeSantis and his lawmakers specified that the state could pick up the immigrants anywhere in the country, not just Florida.)

   In any situation where the migrant is happy to have ended up in California, why press charges? In those cases, the abductors are just doing the migrants a favor. But, in cases in which the migrants wished to have ended up in Idaho or Georgia or Delaware, and cases in which the migrants arrived in California only to find the promised jobs were not awaiting them, prosecute, prosecute, prosecute.

  How harmful is it that the human-movers are tricking the migrants to go where they don't want to go?  A story by The Associated Press quotes California Attorney General Rob Banta as saying, “To see leaders and governments of other states and the state of Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis, acting with cruelty and inhumanity and moral bankruptcy and being petty and small and hurtful and harmful to those vulnerable asylum seekers is blood-boiling.”