DeSantis activates Florida State Guard again on Haitian immigrants desperate for safety.

It appears that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis still thinks he’s running for president.

That explains why he has activated yet again his Y’all Qaeda Militia, a group of under-trained, unpaid, civilian volunteers to repel a non-existing “invasion” from Haiti.

“We cannot have illegal aliens coming to Florida,” DeSantis said when first announcing the new deployment.

Activating his goon squad as a response team is the kind of Fox-News-chumming cruelty that has helped to propel DeSantis to the scrap heap of Republican presidential candidates.

“We’re putting our assets in place to defend the state,” was how DeSants framed his latest posturing as the steadfast warlord of Florida to a Fox News audience.

So, about 130 members of DeSantis’ own toy army, The Florida State Guard, have been dispatched to the Florida Keys to … er, um … do what? Wait on the shore? … ready to repel any desperate Haitians who have made the perilous journey across the Florida Straits to seek asylum.

Calling people fleeing an irrefutable humanitarian crisis “illegal aliens” is both cringe-worthy and legally incorrect if they are arriving to make well-founded asylum claims.

Haiti’s government has been overrun by gangs armed with weapons smuggled through Florida. It has led to the failure of civil order and the closure of the airport and seaport, with living conditions on the island heading toward starvation.

You’d think DeSantis might have an ounce of compassion. After all, he’s the product of poor immigrants. All eight of his great grandparents left Italy during the beginning of the last century in far less dire circumstances, showing up unannounced at Ellis Island. One was pregnant and illiterate, and none were turned away.

The then-governor of New York didn’t race to call a news conference to brand the DeSantis family and the other paper-less Italians migrants as “illegal aliens” and threaten to ship them to some other part of America as a stunt.

But DeSantis, I guess, just can’t help himself. He still imagines that people admire the brand of cruelty he adopted from Donald Trump, his political daddy.

What purpose would there be to essentially kidnap these yet-to-arrive desperate Haitians and fly them to Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts, as DeSantis has suggested he would do?

“We do have our transport program,” DeSantis said while speaking to a politically friendly podcaster. “So, if Haitians land in the Florida Keys, their very next stop very well may be Martha’s Vineyard.”

Haitians come to Florida because of its proximity, and because it is home to the largest Haitian-American community in the United States.

Of the estimated 1.1 million people of Haitian descent living in the United States, more than a half-million of them live in Florida, comprising about 2.4 percent of the state’s population. No other state comes close.

Of the 4.5 million immigrant residents of Florida, about 7.5 percent of them are from Haiti. Only Cubans have come to Florida in greater numbers.

The timing is suspect too. DeSantis was whipping up hysteria about a Haitian “invasion” of Florida less than a week before the presidential preference primary election here.

And although he and Nikki Haley had dropped out of the race, conceding the nomination to Trump, their names were still on the ballot, and their reputations for future electability were on the line and being tallied.

It proved to be another repudiation of DeSantis, this time in his home state. Nearly one in five Republicans who voted in that primary opted to make a protest vote by picking someone other than Trump.

They picked Haley, who garnered 155,464 votes (13 percent), while DeSantis managed only 41,234 votes (3.7 percent) in the land where he imagines he is widely loved.

During a rally in Ohio three days before the primary, Trump gloated about ending the political aspirations of DeSantis, whom Trump considered to be a disloyal underling.

“I hit him hard, I hit him low. I hit him just like we did to ISIS,” Trump told his audience.

“We hit him from the top, and we came under the ground,” Trump continued. “We hit this guy so hard, by the time he announced, nobody knew what the hell happened. They said, ‘What happened to him? He’s a shell of a man.’”

More: Cerabino: "Waiting for DeSantis," a presidential campaign tragicomedy

More: Cerabino: DeSantis and Florida State Guard have disturbing echoes to the Nazi brown shirts

DeSantis may be a “shell of a man,” as Trump said. But he’s a shell of a man with a private militia and the small-bore cruelty best summarized by a twisted version of the Emma Lazarus poem, the one that’s inscribed on the Statue of Liberty, and was there to greet his own ancestors ashore.

“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

“Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, and I will send my unpaid, volunteer, civilian goon squad to slam the golden door on them.”

Frank Cerabino is a news columnist with The Palm Beach Post, part of the Gannett Newspapers' chain.

This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: Florida Gov. DeSantis orders state military to repel migrants of Haiti