Texas governor extols Guard plan
In Rio Grande Valley, Abbott addresses ‘serious threat’ but notes troops’ limits.
WESLACO, Texas — Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has endorsed President Trump’s call to send National Guard troops to the border, and on Thursday echoed that theme in a key spot — the Rio Grande Valley, epicenter of illegal smuggling on the southern border in recent years.
“This operation is necessary in order to deal with an escalation in cross-border traffic,” Abbott said, noting that the number of people crossing the border illegally more than doubled last month compared with this time last year, including more MS-13 gang members and heroin smugglers.
“The cross-border activity is posing serious threats and dangers not only to people in the border region but to people across Texas and the United States,” the Republican governor said, backed by scores of uniformed Texas Guard troops at an armory seven miles north of the border.
Trump has said he expects up to 4,000 added troops in Texas, Arizona, California and New Mexico. He announced the deployments last week after tweeting his alarm that a caravan of hundreds of Central American migrants was traveling to the U.S.
But Thursday, Abbott said “the reason the National Guard was called up has nothing to do with the caravans,” but with “people coming across the border and people who are bringing drugs and other contraband into the country.”
“We are on a trajectory that would put us on the lines of the devastating cross-border activity we saw in years like 2014. So the president was right,” he said.
In 2014, the Rio Grande Valley saw a surge in illegal crossings by tens of thousands of unaccompanied youth and families, mostly Central Americans. ThenTexas Gov. Rick Perry paid to deploy 1,000 National Guard troops. The deployment cost the state $12 million a month initially, but that dropped to about $1 million a month recently as illegal crossings decreased and troops were reduced to about a hundred as of last week.
The latest deployment will be paid for by the federal government, Abbott said, and referred further questions about costs to the Department of Defense. Presidents Obama and George W. Bush also separately deployed the National Guard to the border at an estimated cost of $1.35 billion, according to the Government Accountability Office.
National Guard soldiers will mostly be expected to observe and report illegal smuggling. They cannot arrest, detain or process migrants, Abbott said. He and federal officials have said Guard troops will be armed only for self-defense. But they can aid Border Patrol surveillance, running technology like aerostat blimps, helicopters and observation towers, freeing up agents to detain more immigrants, Abbott said.
“What just the Rio Grande Valley sector alone is dealing with is more than 450 apprehensions a day. It has gotten back to levels that are very high,” he said. “The federal government has a duty and responsibility to secure our border.”
Abbott said 762 Texas Guard troops were on the border Thursday, and said that will increase by 300 a week up to 1,400.
California Gov. Jerry Brown agreed this week to deploy 400 troops to the border, but emphasized that their role is limited. “It will not be a mission to round up women and children or detain people escaping violence and seeking a better life,” the Democrat said in a statement.
The day Trump called for deploying the Guard, Border Patrol officials released statistics showing illegal crossings jumped last month. Agents caught 37,393 people, more than twice as many as they did this time last year. But the increase obscures a longer-term trend: Annual apprehensions have dropped steadily. Last year, agents caught 310,000 people, the lowest annual total since 1971.
Members of Congress have questioned why the National Guard was needed given the downward trend in apprehensions, how long the deployments will last and what they will cost.
Some border-area residents welcomed the National Guard’s arrival as a backstop for the Border Patrol, but others dismissed it as a costly stunt.
John Michael Torres, a spokesman for La Union del Pueblo Entero, a community services group also known as LUPE, said the Guard deployments were only the latest militarization of the area, which he said had become “ridiculous.” “The idea that we would be responding militarily to a humanitarian situation flies in the face of our values,” said Torres, who brought 40 protesters to the Texas Army National Guard armory on Thursday.
But Sheriff Benny Martinez of Brooks County, about 70 miles from the border, said the deployment made sense given news of the caravans and the 2014 influx that overwhelmed counties near the border. Back then border apprehensions spiked, but so did deaths.
“We don’t know how many are coming or when they will arrive, but we don’t want to be caught off guard like we were a few years ago,” he said Thursday at a Border Patrol conference in the Rio Grande Valley to address migrant deaths.