Woman Who Recruited Migrants for DeSantis’ Martha’s Vineyard Flights Identified as Ex-Army Counterintelligence Agent: Report

Photo by Jordan Vonderhaar/Getty Images.

“Perla,” the mysterious woman who reportedly recruited Venezuelan migrants from San Antonio on behalf of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) to fly to Martha’s Vineyard last month, has been identified as a former Army combat medic and counterintelligence agent living in the Tampa area, according to The New York Times.

The two planes that carried 48 Venezuelans to the Massachusetts island garnered a massive amount of media attention for DeSantis’ controversial tactic, including raising questions over whether it was even legal to spend money from a proviso in the state’s budget that allocated $12 million to the Florida Department of Transportation “for implementing a program to facilitate the transport of unauthorized aliens from this state.”

Since the migrants were seeking asylum and had presented themselves to authorities at a border checkpoint, they were not “unlawfully present” and, being in Texas, were not “from this state,” meaning Florida. “The flight briefly touched down in the Panhandle to refuel, but this is, at best, a legal stretch,” wrote Reason’s Peter Suderman.

Multiple migrants told reporters and lawyers that “a smiling blond-haired woman in a cowboy hat” who identified herself only as “Perla” had approached them outside the San Antonio Migrant Resource Center (pictured above), promising them she could take them to somewhere they could find food, shelter, and jobs.

One migrant named Jose told the Washington Post that he had been desperate after arriving in San Antonio and being instructed to go to his aunt’s home in Philadelphia to await his hearing. With no space left in the shelter and no more money for travel, he was staying on the streets — until meeting Perla. She had paid for him and other migrants to stay in a local hotel and promised further benefits:

The La Quinta was a respite. There were real beds, a swimming pool and a breakfast buffet. Perla brought them pizza and hamburgers at night. “I could shower, I could get dressed,” Jose said. He swam in the pool.

Perla offered migrants $10 McDonald’s gift cards if they signed waivers in which “an entire paragraph about liability and transport” and “language specifying that the journey would take place from Texas to Massachusetts” was not completely translated into Spanish, according to the class-action suit. Jose said the forms he signed were in English and that he couldn’t read them…

“If I tell you how I felt, I want to cry,” Jose said. “I felt destroyed inside, tricked, frightened. I didn’t know if they were going to put me in jail, if they’d deport me. I just wanted to get to Philadelphia.”

A report published Sunday evening by The New York Times sheds more light on “Perla’s” identity, citing a source who was “briefed on the San Antonio Sheriff’s office investigation into the matter” as revealing her name to be Perla Huerta:

Ms. Huerta, a former combat medic and counterintelligence agent, was discharged last month after two decades in the U.S. Army that included several deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan, according to military records.

A Venezuelan migrant who was working with Ms. Huerta to recruit migrants confirmed her identity, and a migrant in San Antonio whom Ms. Huerta had unsuccessfully sought to sign up identified a photo of her in an interview with The Times. Several of the migrants on Martha’s Vineyard photographed her during the recruitment process in San Antonio, according to Rachel Self, a lawyer representing the migrants. Lawyers working with them were able to match those photos with others online and in social media belonging to a woman named Perla Huerta.

According to the Times, Huerta lives in Tampa, and their reporters attempted to contact her at her residence and by phone for comment, but were unsuccessful.

The Times article also describes one migrant named Pablo who “appeared broken” and was “weeping uncontrollably” when staff at the community center in Martha’s Vineyard arranged for him to call his family in Venezuela.

“My love, we were tricked,” he said to his wife. “This woman lied to us. She lied.”