MIAMI — Gov. Ron DeSantis offered a theory Wednesday about why boats carrying Haitian refugees aren’t arriving on Florida’s shores, even as the Caribbean nation’s capital is largely ruled by violent gangs.

The reason, DeSantis said, is people who might want to leave Haiti don’t try because they know if they’re found on the open water they’ll be sent back.

DeSantis took a measure of credit for that policy and what he said is the result as he pointed to the interdiction last week of a boat off the South Florida coast.

It’s the Biden administration, which DeSantis criticized later in the same answer, that has maintained the U.S. government policy of returning people interdicted on the open water to the country where they originated.

Later on Wednesday, DeSantis’ office announced the state has evacuated a total of 722 Americans from Haiti. The operation began on March 20, after turmoil in the country made it difficult to get around the capital and disrupted commercial air service.

DeSantis offered his assessment of about the lack of refugees arriving via sea when he offered a long response to an unrelated question at an event in the Gulf coast town of Redington Shores.

“You look at what we’ve done by holding people accountable trying to come to this country, our state, illegally. We just interdicted like another 40 Haitians illegally coming, and there were human smugglers on the boat,” DeSantis said.

“We stopped them, they’re not on the shores of Florida. They got stopped and they got sent back. And so people now, and I think one of the reasons you haven’t seen an influx of vessels from Haiti since you’ve had everything really go — I mean it’s, it’s always been problematic but — south even more in the last couple of months, is because people know why would you want to get in some boat chart for the Florida Keys knowing you’re gonna get stopped, turned around and sent back to where you came from?” he said. “It’s not worth it. It’s not worth doing.”

On Friday, Miami-Dade Police stopped a 60-foot yacht near the South Florida coast and found what the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission said were “approximately 30 migrants of Haitian nationality and two alleged human smugglers.” FWC, a state agency whose law enforcement officers participated in the interdiction, said the migrants were turned over to the U.S. Coast Guard for repatriation.

In March, the Coast Guard repatriated 65 migrants to Haiti. They’d been found near the Bahamas.

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