President Trump encountered a potential roadblock Thursday in his push to deploy National Guard troops to the southwest border, after Democratic officials in California demanded more details before approving the president’s request.
Homeland Security officials spent Thursday morning making calls to California lawmakers, the state’s National Guard unit, and Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown about the need for increased manpower at the U.S.-Mexico border, where immigration officials faced a 37 percent surge in attempted illegal crossings last month.
A White House official told the Washington Examiner that Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen has already had multiple calls with Brown since Trump signed a proclamation on Wednesday authorizing the National Guard to be sent to the border. State governments control their National Guard troops.
California National Guard spokesman Lt. Col. Tom Keegan has said the state is waiting on further details about “funding, duration, and end state” before making a decision. “End state” is used to describe conditions that would indicate the successful completion of an operation at the border.
The Golden State has twice participated in deployments of National Guard troops to the border, in 2006 and 2010, and currently has about 55 members stationed in San Diego helping with a counter-drug program.
However, the president’s current request for reinforcement comes at a time when his administration is viewed by most state and local officials as a growing menace. California currently has two dozen lawsuits pending against the Trump administration over a variety of issues, the majority of which involve immigration policy.
A former top Justice Department official said it wouldn’t be the end of the world if California declined to deploy additional National Guard troops to the border, but it could potentially prevent the Trump administration from more effectively deterring prospective illegal immigrants in the coming months.
“Trump has Title 10 authority to federalize the National Guard, but that is for a national emergency, such as a threat to the sovereignty of the United States,” said Leon Fresco, who led the Justice Department’s Office of Immigration Litigation for the Obama administration. “He would have to say the kind of situation in California is literally a threat to the continued existence of the United States and frankly, things have substantially improved since 20 years ago when you had thousands of people stampeding across the border every day.”
Another reason California could decide not to send National Guard troops to the border is that its infrastructure, though dilapidated in many areas, is superior to what stands elsewhere between the U.S. and Mexico.
“California, at the end of the day, has fences everywhere unlike Texas and Arizona,” Fresco explained. He added that the illegal crossings, drug trafficking and human smuggling that does happen in the San Diego area “is not occurring at the kind of broad scale as it is in Texas, where you have a completely undefended border and some areas where it’s easy to blend in.”
U.S. Customs and Border Protection recorded more than 27,000 apprehensions last year in Texas’ Rio Grand Valley, while nearly 3,000 illegal immigrants were arrested in Tuscon, Ariz. Meanwhile, immigration officials in California apprehended a total of 1,550 unaccompanied alien children and family units at the border in 2017, data provided by the agency shows.
It’s one of the reasons why both Texas and Arizona have enthusiastically embraced Trump’s plans to crackdown at the border.
“Arizona welcomes the deployment of National Guard to the border,” Arizona’s GOP Gov. Doug Ducey tweeted Wednesday. “Washington has ignored this issue for too long and help is needed. For Arizona, it’s all about public safety.”
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, also a Republican, released a statement saying the president’s desire to move National Guard troops to the border advances his top priority of “ensuring the safety and security of Texans.”
“Texas will continued to implement robust border security efforts, and this partnership will help ensure we are doing everything we can to stem the flow of illegal immigration,” Abbott said.
A spokesman for New Mexico Gov. Susan Martinez echoed those statements, and said she offered her full support to the state’s National Guard following Wednesday’s announcement by the White House.
Trump is the third president in the past two decades to order the deployment of National Guard troops to the border. Barack Obama requested an extra $500 million from Congress in May 2010 after directing 1,200 National Guard members to the Mexican border. And in 2006, George W. Bush initiated Operation Jump Start, which involved moving 6,000 guardsmen to the border for two years to reinforce existing border control efforts.
The president’s decision will almost definitely come at a cost to Congress and the Pentagon, depending on how many troops Trump plans to deploy and for how long. One congressional aide told the Sacramento Bee the annual price tag could be anywhere between $60 to $120 million, a cost that would like draw scrutiny from the president’s political opponents.
“If you’re having these operations every day, and they were never appropriated, [the administration is] going to have to take that from the military budget or reroute funds,” Fresco said.
The president’s call for an increased law enforcement presence at the southwest border comes amid other efforts by his administration to tighten the rules for illegal immigrants who seek asylum after crossing the border, and to end practice known as “catch-and-release.” That policy has enabled some immigrants to reside illegally in the U.S. for years until they are scheduled to appear for deportation hearings.
But as expected, prominent California politicians have dismissed Trump’s request as a nonsensical and reckless waste of resources.
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., issued a statement Thursday accusing the president of pursuing another “cynical political trick in the book to ignite anti-immigrant fervor” by demanding a “needless militarization of the border.”
“The fact of the matter is, we’re seeing the lowest number of attempts to come into the country illegally since 1971. This is not a crisis – but the president is not given to facts,” added Democratic California Rep. Anna Eshoo.
