Republican Rep. Francis Rooney broke with President Trump on whether to send U.S. troops to the nation’s southern border with Mexico as Trump suggested earlier Tuesday.
“I don’t really feel really comfortable with deploying military troops and creating the possibility for an increase in violence and an escalation of the conflict,” the Florida lawmaker told CNN.
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Trump told reporters the U.S. would be “guarding our border with the military” until a border wall could be constructed and “proper security” put in place to prevent illegal crossings.
Rooney said he’d rather immigration “be handled in a civil context and not a military one.”
“These people should be stopped at the border and vetted out, just the normal process, and we should have plenty of agents down there to do that,” Rooney added.
Former Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush both dispatched troops to the U.S.-Mexico border during their time in the White House. Obama sent 1,200 National Guard troops to the southern border in 2010, and Bush sent more than 6,000 troops to the border between 2006 and 2008.
