Second flight of migrants from Texas lands at Sacramento Executive Airport

A second plane carrying migrants from South America arrived Monday morning in Sacramento, three days after 16 migrants from South America were flown on a private chartered flight from New Mexico to California’s capital city.

California Attorney General Rob Bonta said he believes both flights were arranged by the state of Florida and its governor, Ron DeSantis.

“Two of the men who were on the chartered flight on Friday were on the chartered flight today,” Bonta said, adding that he believes the pair work for Vertol Systems Company — the organization behind a similar flight that transported nearly 50 mostly Venezuelan asylum seekers from San Antonio to Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, last year.

Logs from the flight tracking website FlightAware showed a flight landing at 10:26 a.m. Monday at Sacramento Executive Airport, about two hours after taking off from Deming, New Mexico, the same departure point as Friday’s flight.

The flight brought 20 migrants, all of them adults, Sacramento County spokeswoman Kim Nava said during an impromptu news conference Monday afternoon at Sacramento Executive Airport.

Of the second group of migrants, 16 were from Venezuela, two from Colombia, one from Nicaragua and one from Mexico, according to Attorney General Rob Bonta.

Bonta said that many of the migrants were “anxious and emotional” when they arrived.

“Florida, through this program, is demonstrating the worst of who we can be,” Bonta said.

The migrants were given Little Caesars pizza and water at the airport and were then transported to a religious institution. Nava, who did not identify the institution, said county social workers are en route to assess the situation. She expected the migrants to be housed in Sacramento.

The county was not aware the flight was arriving until Monday morning, Nava said.

The FlightAware history for the aircraft shows the plane traveling Monday morning from El Paso International to Deming Municipal Airport, then flying from Deming to Sacramento. It then took off at 12:14 p.m. in Sacramento and was returning to El Paso International.

The log shows the flight was en route to Sacramento’s McClellan Airport near North Highlands, where Friday’s flight landed, before being diverted to Sacramento Executive Airport.

Monday’s flight used the same plane as Friday’s charter, operated by Texas-based Berry Aviation, according to flight records compiled by The Sacramento Bee. According to FlightAware, the same de Havilland Dash 8 twin turboprop flew Friday from El Paso International to Deming Municipal to McClellan Airport that morning, then back to El Paso International that afternoon.

No other flights were listed for the plane between Friday and Monday.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Attorney General Rob Bonta over the weekend and Monday morning blamed Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis for Friday’s flight.

Bonta in an interview with ABC News said the migrants on Friday’s flight arrived in Sacramento carrying release documents indicating the flight was part of Florida’s program for relocating unauthorized migrants, mostly from Texas, to other states.

No politician or organization has publicly taken responsibility for the flight. Bonta, however, is already blaming DeSantis and said he was preparing to file charges for the stunt. Those charges could include false imprisonment and kidnapping, as well as violations of California’s unfair competition law, Bonta told ABC News.

In a tweet Monday morning, Newsom called DeSantis a “small, pathetic man” and included a link to California’s penal code section on kidnapping.

The 16 migrants from Friday’s flight, from Venezuela and Colombia, were left on the doorstep of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Sacramento in the city’s Curtis Park area.

Sacramento ACT, a collaboration of area religious congregations, said in a statement that after being processed at the border, the migrants were approached by “individuals representing a private contractor” who said they would assist them with getting to a migrant center where they would find jobs and free support.

McClatchyDC’s Michael Wilner and the Miami Herald’s Ana Ceballos and Sarah Blaskey contributed to this story.