WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump warned Tuesday that “the high crime rate will only get higher” along California’s border with Mexico after the state’s Democratic governor turned down administration plans to deploy National Guard troops along the border.
“Looks like Jerry Brown and California are not looking for safety and security along their very porous Border. He cannot come to terms for the National Guard to patrol and protect the Border,” the president wrote on Twitter.
Looks like Jerry Brown and California are not looking for safety and security along their very porous Border. He cannot come to terms for the National Guard to patrol and protect the Border. The high crime rate will only get higher. Much wanted Wall in San Diego already started!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 17, 2018
“The high crime rate will only get higher. Much wanted Wall in San Diego already started!”
Brown, the only Democratic governor of a state bordering Mexico, had originally agreed to Trump’s request to deploy the National Guard along the border, a step the president has said is necessary until his long-promised border wall is completed. But now he considers that the mission that the federal authorities intended to entrust to them differed with their criteria.
The governor of California strongly opposed to the Trump government on immigration issues, “determined that what we had asked was intolerable,” the deputy director of customs and border protection Ronald Vitiello told a news conference in Washington.
“We made the request in detail, went through the decision process and received the message from the governor that he will not participate,” he added. Brown had let it be known last week that he only accepted the deployment of 400 soldiers in California if they were meant to combat transnational crime.
“It will not be a mission to build a new wall (…) or to proceed with raids of women and children or people who escape violence and seek a better life,” he said.
This week, the National Guard and the departments of Internal Security and Defense sent the governor a detailed proposal in which they requested the deployment of 237 soldiers in two large border posts in which they would have had to assume administrative functions and help operations that they will need heavy equipment. Brown refused to satisfy the demand.
The National Guard, an army reserve corps, already intervened on the border in 2010, by order of President Barack Obama, and in 2006-2008, under the management of George W. Bush. In each of these operations, its mission extended for one year. Soldiers will have no obligation to carry arms, but some may carry them for reasons of “self-defense,” General Daniel Hokanson, number 2 of the National Guard, said during the press conference.
Some 960 soldiers, he said, were already deployed Monday in other border states: 250 in Arizona, 60 in New Mexico and 650 in Texas. According to Bob Salesses, a senior Pentagon official, those troops will not build the wall that President Donald Trump intends to raise.
“At the present time (…) we do not see the need to formulate that demand,” he said.
Donald Trump recently announced the deployment of between 2,000 and 4,000 men on the border, and said he could keep them in the area until the construction of the wall.
