Gov. Ron DeSantis has spent at least $15.2 million in the first half of the year to address “illegal migration,” tapping a $500 million state fund that was made available to him to use for emergencies, records show.
The cost of DeSantis’ immigration efforts is not fully known, but records obtained by the Herald/Times give a snapshot of how the Republican governor has been using state resources this year to respond to an issue that has been central to his presidential campaign.
Since January, DeSantis has spent $4.5 million to support the Florida National Guard’s response to a state of emergency DeSantis declared in Florida “due to the mass migration of unauthorized aliens” and $10.7 million to respond to a separate state of emergency he declared back in 2021 to “protect Floridians against the dangerous impacts of the Biden Border Crisis.”
The documents showing the expenditures do not provide much detail on what the money was spent on, except to say state funds were used to support the Florida National Guard.
In a statement on Thursday, the Florida Division of Emergency Management, which oversees these efforts, said the state funds covered the cost of sending Florida National Guard members to the southern border in Texas and personnel to the Florida Keys to respond to the state’s “own mass migration.”
The expenses include the cost of having pilots, ground crew and equipment to keep an eye on migrants who fled Cuba and Haiti andlanded in the Keys. The response came after DeSantis declared a state of emergency in January and issued an executive order that activated the Florida National Guard and other state agencies to help patrol offshore.
DeSantis extended the executive order for 60 more days on June 30.
On June 14, DeSantis spent $3.3 million to support the Florida National Guard and “cover the costs for up to 650 personnel sent to the Southwest Texas border through June, 10, 2023,” according to documents that show such an expenditure was authorized.
Florida personnel were sent to the southern border after Texas Gov. Greg Abbott requested assistance from other states to help support border security efforts in his state. The request was made in May under the Emergency Management Assistance Compact, a mutual-aid partnership among all states.
Generally, the state that sends help is reimbursed by the state that is asking for help. At least that is the case outlined in the Emergency Management Assistance Compact’s website. But Abbott made clear in his request that Texas was requesting assisting states to “absorb associated costs with this mission in support of the entire country,” records show.
Florida obliged. The state sent Florida National Guard members to support Texas’ Operation Lone Star in May for two weeks on site, and then sent a “second wave of soldiers totaling Florida’s coverage to 30 days until the next supporting state rotated in,” Amelia Johnson, a spokesperson for the state Division of Emergency Management, said in a statement.
“Florida was one of nine states whose National Guard answered the call to provide resources and personnel to combat the crisis at the southern border,” Johnson said.
Emergency dollars spent on immigration issues
Records show the money spent was part of a $500 million “Emergency Preparedness and Response Fund “that the Florida Legislature approved last year to give the governor direct access to cash when he declares emergencies. DeSantis initially had requested $1 billion.
When state lawmakers were considering establishment of the fund, the DeSantis administration largely talked about needing it in the context of storm recovery, including road repairs, debris removal and other unexpected disaster-related costs.
Republican legislative leaders who backed the proposal said the $500 million would place “guardrails” on the governor’s spending, arguing that without it the governor had no spending ceiling when it came to emergencies.
Critics, however, argued the governor did not need a half-a-billion dollars to use with little oversight.
The cost of DeSantis’ immigration plans
The DeSantis administration has defended the use of state resources at the southern border, arguing that Florida is willing to mitigate the impact of the federal government’s “failed” immigration policies.
In addition to the millions spent this year, records show that DeSantis also spent at least $1.6 million to send law enforcement officers to the U.S.-Mexico border in Texas in the summer of 2021.
At the time, the governor’s office argued Florida taxpayers were “footing an enormous bill for Democrats’ destructive open-borders agenda,” that was more than the cost of sending state resources to the Texas border.
The seven-week trip, led by three state agencies, was cast by the Republican governor as a needed measure to beef up security at the border amid the failures of Biden’s administration, while critics saw the effort as a state-funded political errand used to further DeSantis’ national footprint ahead of a potential 2024 White House bid.
DeSantis has also spent millions of dollars to fund a program that sent migrants from Texas to Democratic strongholds, including California and Martha’s Vineyard, an island in Massachusetts.
