Texas Governor Rick Perry joined host Brit Hume on “Fox News Sunday” to explain his dissatisfaction with President Obama’s call for $3.7 billion in emergency funding from Congress to help deal with the crisis at our Southern border.
“It is a very large amount of money and as you analyze it, very little of it is for border security,” the governor explained.
Most of the package would be used by the Department of Health and Human Services in caring for the children who have crossed over without adult supervision. Less than half — $1.6 billion — would bring more law enforcement and immigration judges and lawyers to the border.
“I think until he gets realistic about the problem and how you deal with the problem – and it is a border security issue, and we’ve got a track record now of five-plus years of him disregarding what’s going on on the border,” Perry said of the president. “Here’s his opportunity to lead. Don’t blame this on anyone. Lay out a plan.”
Instead of Obama’s outrageous emergency spending package, Perry argued that the president should send National Guard troops to the border to send a forceful message to individuals trying to cross into the country illegally.
“We called some four years ago for 1,000 National Guard troops to temporarily go to the border so that they could help push forward that show of force, if you will,” detailed Perry, “and they’re there for a limited period of time until you have the opportunity to train up some 3,000 more border patrol agents that would go and replace them.”
The Texas governor also explained that the border patrol agents need to move up closer to the border to add to this “show of force.”
“The president was not even aware that his border patrol was back 40 or 45 miles away from the border at these check points,” Perry revealed. “They need to be right on the river. They need to be there as a show of force because that’s the message that gets sent back very quickly to Central America. It’s important to do that because this flood of children is pulling away the border patrol from their normal duties of keeping bad people, keeping the drug cartels [out].”
Even though, as Hume pointed out, the National Guard troops wouldn’t lawfully be able to apprehend children passing over the border, Perry stressed that the “show of force” will be enough to stop the flow of immigrants into the United States.
“The issue is with being able to send that message because it’s the visual of it, I think, that is more important,” asserted Perry. “We know that. We listen to those conversations — or, I should say, conversations are being monitored with calls back to Central America — and the message is, ‘Hey, come on up here, everything is great, they’re taking care of us,’ and that needs to stop.”
Rick Perry isn’t the only lawmaker urging the president to send National Guardsmen to the border. John Boehner has repeatedly voiced his support of the idea, most recently last week, and Rep. Candice Miller (R-MI) has suggested that the National Guard could best assist the “overwhelmed border agents.”
Like Perry, some members of Congress are also dissatisfied with Obama’s request for monetary support to deal with the border crisis. On Friday, Chairman of the Appropriations Committee Rep. Hal Rogers said of the president’s emergency spending package, “It’s too much money. We don’t need it.”
