AUSTIN, Texas — Gov. Rick Perry said Monday that he is deploying up to 1,000 National Guard troops over the next month to the Texas-Mexico border to combat criminals who Republican state leaders say are exploiting a surge of children and families entering the U.S. illegally.
Perry, a vocal critic of the White House’s response to the border crisis, said the state has a responsibility to act after “lip service” from the federal government.
He rejected suggestions that Texas was militarizing local communities by putting National Guard troops on the ground and that crime data along the border doesn’t justify additional resources. Perry, state law enforcement officials and ranchers in the area have said that Mexican drug cartels and other criminal organizations were benefiting from the diversion of resources, so more security was needed.
The deployment will cost Texas an estimated $12 million a month. Texas Adjutant General John Nichols said his troops would simply be “referring and deterring” illegal aliens and not detaining people — though Nichols said the National Guard could if asked.
“We think they’ll come to us and say, ‘Please take us to a Border Patrol station,’” Nichols said.
More than 3,000 Border Patrol agents currently work in the region, and Perry has repeatedly asked President Barack Obama to send the National Guard to the border. Much of the area has been overwhelmed in recent months by tens of thousands of unaccompanied children illegally entering the U.S.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection didn’t respond to a request for comment Monday.
As governor, Perry is commander in chief of Texas military forces unless those forces have already been mobilized by the White House. But if Perry deploys National Guard troops, it is up to Texas to pay for them, while an order from Obama would mean Washington picks up the tab.
“Gov. Perry has referred repeatedly to his desire to make a symbolic statement to the people of Central America that the border is closed,” White House spokesman Josh Earnest said. “And he thinks that the best way to do that is to send 1,000 National Guard troops to the border. It seems to me that a much more powerful symbol would be the bipartisan passage of legislation that would actually make a historic investment in border security and send an additional 20,000 personnel to the border.”
Earnest also said the White House hasn’t received the kind of “formal communication” with Perry’s office that usually accompanies such deployments.
Perry announced last month that Texas would steer another $1.3 million each week to the Department of Public Safety to assist in border security through at least the end of the year. In a letter to Obama on June 20 criticizing “our porous border,” Perry made several requests for help, including 1,000 National Guard troops, additional helicopters and giving troops “arrest powers to support Border Patrol operations until sufficient Border Patrol resources can be hired, trained and deployed to the border.”
It’s not clear why Perry would need the Obama administration to authorize arrest powers, and the governor’s office did not offer details ahead of the announcement. Texas law simply states that the governor can “adopt rules and regulations governing enlistment, organization, administration” of the Texas State Guard.
In a White House letter to Perry on July 7, Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett laid out steps the administration was taking to deal with what the president had called an “urgent humanitarian situation,” but did not mention the National Guard.
Attempting to build support and momentum as he considers entering the 2016 Republican presidential race again after his failed campaign in 2012, Perry told a group of Iowa veterans on Sunday that if Obama failed to send troops to the border, Texas leaders would do so under their own authority.
“We’ve sent the message that if we don’t get the satisfaction that the federal government’s going to move and move quickly, then the state of Texas will in fact fill that void,” Perry said Sunday in Clear Lake, Iowa, according to The Des Moines Register.
Since October, more than 57,000 unaccompanied children and teenagers have entered the U.S. illegally — more than double compared with the same period a year earlier. Most have been from Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador, where rampant gang violence and intense poverty have driven tens of thousands of people outside their borders. Most of those children have been turning themselves in to the first person in a uniform they see.
The White House said Monday that the number of unaccompanied minors crossing the border is dropping significantly. Earnest said about 150 children daily — on average — were apprehended along the Rio Grande border in the first two weeks of July. He said that’s down from an average of 355 per day in June.
Information for this article was contributed by Christopher Sherman, Will Weissert and staff members of The Associated Press and by Manny Fernandez of The New York Times.