A black, luxury SUV with tinted windows pulled into a parking space along the side of a drab, two-story La Quinta motel planted on the northwestern edge of 12 lanes of highway that loop around downtown San Antonio. A woman with straight, light-colored hair got out of the rented Infiniti. She took the outdoor stairs, walked to the far end and knocked on the doors to rooms 243 and 241, where a group of Venezuelan asylum-seekers had spent five anxious days waiting. She brought them food and a message: They were being sent to Delaware. The bus to the airport would be leaving at 5 a.m. the next day — Tuesday, Sept. 20 — she said, according to interviews with six migrants housed at the hotel. The migrants didn't know that they were being swept up in an operation that bore striking similarities to one organized the week before by operatives for Gov. Ron DeSantis that ended with 48 Venezuelan migrants dropped off on a Massachusetts island. Or that the trip to Delaware being dangled would never happen.
They also didn't know that an anonymous source close to DeSantis would suggest to NBC News that a planned charter flight from San Antonio to Delaware — that was destined for an airport not far from President Joe Biden's summer home, according to flight records, and dominated cable news on Tuesday — was canceled without explanation and then used to "punk" journalists and Democrats and keep the "spotlight" on immigration. Ultimately, the migrants interviewed by the Herald were the butt of the joke. They thought they were going somewhere. Five days before she knocked on the door of their motel rooms, the woman, who never told them her name, had recruited the migrants to join a secret operation to transport asylum-seekers out of Texas. She had approached them outside San Antonio's migrant resource center and said she worked for an organization that she did not name.
She offered "clandestine flights" to places that she said could not be disclosed until the last minute. But she promised the destination cities had more resources to help the men, who had just crossed the border after a perilous months-long journey through the Panamanian jungle up through Central America and eventually across the U.S.-Mexico border to Texas towns struggling to accommodate the thousands of people coming in. "She said there would be work. She said that they would get us there and then there would be help," said one of the migrants, Pedro Escalona, who had trekked to San Antonio from Venezuela. His asylum hearing was scheduled to take place next month in Washington, D.C., and he hoped to at least get part of the way there.
[...]
There would be no flight. The migrants were told the next morning it had been canceled. No reason was given.
www.nbcnews.com
