Border left 'wide open' after red states pull National Guard and police
Anna GiaritelliMCALLEN, Texas — The swarm of National Guard soldiers and state police that governors sent to guard the Texas-Mexico border earlier this summer are gone, leaving the border effectively unmanned with just 6% of the reinforcements left behind.
“We used to have a National Guard posted there,” Border Patrol agent Chris Cabrera told theWashington Examiner while driving along a dirt road that runs parallel with the border near the Hidalgo port of entry late one evening recently. “There was another one right over here, but they took that guy, too."
Cabrera is the vice president of the Border Patrol union’s Rio Grande Valley chapter. On a 12-mile drive along roads that agents use to access the overgrown land along the Rio Grande, Cabrera points out a total of 11 spots where National Guard soldiers had been posted all summer. They manned mobile camera towers and could also call in sightings of illegal immigrants or drug smugglers attempting to sneak through the brush.
Now, no one is keeping watch and Cabrera admits that agents, half of whom have been pulled from the field to transport and process illegal crossers in custody, do not even know who is coming through in those unguarded areas. Cabrera described it as "wide open."
“We were already stretched thin with their help and having them here relieved a lot of pressure on us,” Cabrera said. “Now they took away manpower that we can't really afford for them to take away.”
Reinforcements were called in at the start of summer. In June, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott solicited help from other states to patrol the border as more migrants were coming across than any time in the past two decades. Arkansas and South Dakota sent in state National Guard soldiers, while state troopers were called in from Florida, Iowa, Nebraska, and Ohio.
But four months since Abbott’s call for assistance, nearly all have quietly returned home, according to data provided by the Texas Division of Emergency Management and the Texas Military Department. The 48 soldiers from South Dakota were called back. Among the state police, all 14 in Ohio, 26 in Nebraska, 28 in Iowa, and 69 from Florida have been pulled from the line, unable to endlessly work out of state.
Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds, a Republican, said on Wednesday that the state could not continue with the costs, while other governors have said their states need law enforcement back in their communities.
As of Friday, just 11 soldiers from outside Texas are the only out-of-state military or law enforcement help Texas has on the border, fewer than a tenth of the personnel who were there this summer.
“They would monitor the mobile center, mobile tower trucks, camera trucks,” Cabrera said. “Nobody is bringing those out because they're not there. These were static positions where we would put a vehicle and two guardsmen in there so if somebody ran across that area, they could call it out.”
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Border left 'wide open' after red states pull National Guard and police (msn.com)
Why the $#@! even have a border when you aren't willing to protect it.
Joe has trashed America.
Joe is going to crash the economy and we can't stop that train now even if we wanted to.
Joe is hunting citizens. He and his administration is stepping all over Free Speech.
What have you mother $#@!ers done to us? What ever you think you've done, you've done it to yourselves, too.