US Governor Ron DeSantis says Andrew Tate is not ‘welcome’ in Florida

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has said the Tate brothers, Andrew and Tristan, are not welcome in the state after they flew in yesterday on a private plane and landed in Fort Lauderdale. 

At a press conference on Thursday, Republican governor Ron DeSantis said attorney general James Uthmeier was looking at what “state hooks and jurisdictions” they had to deal with, with the arrival of the influencers in the US.

The brothers were arrested in Romania in December 2022 and have been charged with rape, human trafficking, sexually exploiting women, money laundering and starting an organised crime group.

They were required to remain in Romania while the case was ongoing. However, it is understood that the Trump administration lobbied for them to be allowed to travel. 

According to a report in The Financial Times, US officials spoke on the phone to the Romanian government in early February, then Trump’s special envoy and former department of national intelligence director Richard Grenell raised the matter with the Romanian foreign minister at the Munich Security Conference in mid-February.

Alina Habba, who is serving as an advisor to Trump during his second term, admitted she was a “big fan” of Tate when she met him on the Benny Show podcast in January. And Andrew is an advocate for Trump, saying last year during an interview on Al Arabiya English that he was the best man for the US presidency and was a “masculine man”.

DeSantis said he had no advance knowledge they were coming to Florida until he heard it on the news.

“The reality is, Florida is not a place where you are welcome, with that type of conduct in the air. I don’t know how it came to this. We were not involved. We were not notified,” DeSantis said.

DeSantis has been cracking down on human trafficking in the state and approved $4.9m in the 2024-2025 budget to combat it.

Ironically, DeSantis himself was accused of human trafficking after he was investigated for improperly used funds to transport migrants from Texas to Martha’s Vinyard on chartered flights.

While the Tate brothers are known for their far-right and misogynistic ideology and have millions of followers on social media, it is Andrew that has the bigger following. Police in the UK also have an arrest warrant out for the brothers for allegations of rape and human trafficking.

An American woman in Florida has also filed a civil lawsuit against the brothers this month, alleging they coerced her into sex work. She said the brothers have defamed her after she testified against them in Budapest.

Last summer, Andrew was implicated as one of the main instigators in spreading misinformation about the perpetrator of a stabbing attack that killed three children.

Andrew claimed the perpetrator was Muslim and an illegal immigrant despite having publicly converted to Islam in 2022. The misinformation lead to racist and Islamophobic riots across the UK.