More than a dozen Republican governors gathered in Eagle Pass in February, vowing to send another round of National Guard troops from their states to the Texas-Mexico border. States Newsroom outlets across the country have tracked state deployments and expenses so far this year in collaboration with Texas Tribune. With shifts in pandemic-era federal border policies, there’d been a sharp increase in migrant encounters in the latter half of 2023. Then January saw a steep 50% drop. Still, the governors told their constituents that they needed to send more people to assist Texas in fending off an “invasion,” as both Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis have called it.
The deployments have been widely criticized as political grandstanding — opportunities to take photos near personnel in uniform on the border while feeding nationalism and fear during an election year, States Newsroom reports. States generally chip in anywhere from five to 200 troops for deployments that can last anywhere from a couple of weeks to months. Typically, the funding comes from state budgets and state emergency funds. The federal government also deploys thousands of National Guard members to the border year-round. Gen. Daniel Hokanson, the chief of the U.S. National Guard Bureau who will retire Sept. 1, told the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense in mid-June that nearly 2,500 troops were serving at the southwest border under federal command.
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