Gov. Brown urged to pull guard troops from border over family separations.
Amid national uproar over the Trump administration’s separation of immigrant children from their parents — fueled by images and audio of distraught, crying youngsters — activists and elected officials are pushing Gov. Jerry Brown to yank California’s National Guard troops from the U.S.Mexico border.
At least nine other governors around the country have cancelled national guard deployments to the border in response to the controversy in recent days, including the Republican governors of New Hampshire, Maryland and Massachusetts.
But Brown hasn’t made any move to follow suit. The state has about 400 National Guard members deployed on a mission supporting border security while not actually enforcing immigration law, in response to a request from the Trump administration earlier this year.
Former State Senate President Kevin de León urged Brown to cancel that deployment in a letter Tuesday.
“This is a shameful chapter in American history and California should have no part in — directly or indirectly — imposing irreparable trauma on thousands of vulnerable young children,” wrote de León, a candidate for U.S. Senate.
California pulling out of the National Guard mission would have a bigger impact than the other governors’ actions — most of the state executives who’ve spoken out so far were taking essentially symbolic action, as their states only have a handful of troops at the border or none at all.
Under the Trump administration’s “zero-tolerance” policy, more than 2,000 immigrant kids have been separated from their parents since early May. While adults are detained while crossing the border illegally and charged with illegal entry, their children are housed by the federal Department of Human Services.
Brown toed a narrow line when he agreed to deploy the troops, spelling out a mission that involved combatting transnational gangs and cross-border trafficking while explicitly preventing service members from enforcing immigration law. Spokesman Evan Westrup pointed to the governor’s letter in April declaring that the Golden State troops would not “round up women and children or detain people escaping violence and seeking a better life.”
But having California troops at the border in any role goes too far, argued Pedro Rios, an immigration activist in San Diego.
“Even when the National Guard are supporting Border Patrol with duties that don’t involve immigration enforcement, that allows for more Border Patrol agents to be out in the field,” Rios said, urging Brown to cancel the deployment.
Other California leaders have been far more outspoken on the issue than Brown. Sen. Kamala Harris on Monday called on Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen to resign, while Sen. Dianne Feinstein has championed a bill banning the separation of families at the border.
Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, the frontrunner to replace Brown in the 2018 election, has said he would not have agreed to send any California guard troops to the border. Newsom spokesman Nathan Click said Tuesday that the lieutenant governor “hopes the governor reconsiders” the deployment in light of the family separations.
Newsom’s rival for the governor’s mansion, San Diego County businessman John Cox, has said he opposes the policy of separating families, but avoided blaming the Trump administration for it, instead calling on Congress to pass a law ending the practice.
Trump has falsely accused Democrats in Congress of being behind the policy, even though his administration put it in place and could decide to curtail the practice.