Berry Aviation, headquartered at San Marcos Regional Airport, brings despicable shame to Hays County. The airline has been named in an ongoing law-enforcement investigation by the State of California for what Gov. Gavin Newsom suggested may constitute kidnapping. Twice in early June, newly arrived immigrants in El Paso were taken to Sacramento by charter plane – 36 people in total – at the behest of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s relocation regime, the dubiously named Voluntary Migrant Transport Program.

Review of flight records by The Sacramento Bee confirmed Berry Aviation was the aircraft involved in what California Attorney General Rob Bonta labeled “deceptive and immoral transports.” “Upon meeting with the asylum seekers who had been flown to Sacramento via private plane, without any prior arrangements or immediate care provision, we understood the urgent need for a thorough investigation,” the state’s chief legal officer said June 14.

On June 2, passengers on the first of the two flights – a Dash 8 turboprop airliner owned by Berry Aviation – found themselves ditched at the doorstep of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Sacramento, where church officials didn’t know they’d be arriving. A local alliance of religious congregations, Sacramento ACT, who assisted the group, stated the asylum seekers possessed little more than backpacks and had no idea where they had been abandoned.

“Human trafficking is not only despicable; it’s a felony,” Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg declared in a statement. “Whoever is behind this must answer the following: Is there anything more cruel than using scared human beings to score cheap political points?”

Numerous people flown by Berry Aviation to California had pending court dates for asylum cases elsewhere – including, strikingly, in Florida.

In June, Bonta cited false imprisonment as one potential criminal charge for the flights, while Newsom tweeted a snippet of state penal code that defines kidnapping as abduction “by force or fraud.” The A.G.’s office said the deserted asylum seekers they interviewed alleged that they were given false promises of jobs, housing and clothing prior to boarding the plane.

Last year, Texas’ own campaign to relocate immigrants sparked national fervor when a 3-year-old child died on a bus to Chicago – one of 30,000 people shuttled to Democrat-controlled cities as part of Gov. Greg Abbott’s multi-billion-dollar Operation Lone Star.

Ironically, for decades Berry Aviation has operated from the airport along Highway 21, a route with historic origins as El Camino Real de Los Tejas – a principal artery of immigration for thousands of white colonists in the early 19th century – snaking beyond the Rio Grande River, on toward Mexico City.

As California considers criminal charges against Berry Aviation for its role in the transport and abandonment of desperate asylum seekers, residents are right to recoil at the company’s egregious, immoral profiteering.