Stocking shelves and clearing brush, guardsmen serve on border amid political heat
www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/stocking-shelves-and-clearing-brush-guardsmen-serve-on-border-amid-political-heat/2019/02/16/12997fba-30ae-11e9-ac6c-14eea99d5e24_story.html?utm_term=.b94bd9efd2b4
Staff Sgt. Chris Cazares is panting to catch his breath after slicing down a salt cedar on the banks of the Colorado River with one of those orange-handled saws commonly used in school shop class.
A supervisor at a nursing home, the longtime soldier in the Army National Guard was previously deployed twice to Iraq, where he specialized in neutralizing chemical attacks. Now he is deployed to his hometown on Arizona’s border with Mexico. Here, he is neutralizing trees.
...Whether Cazares and his fellow guardsmen are needed here on the border has become the subject of a renewed debate that has cleaved along party lines. It has again put the U.S. border with Mexico at the center of national political rancor that is poised to escalate after Trump declared a national emergency Friday, bucking Congress to secure more funding for a wall.
In recent days, the newly inaugurated governors of California and New Mexico, both Democrats, ordered the withdrawal of most guardsmen from the border in their states, suggesting that Trump had deployed the Guard not because CBP is facing a crisis but rather because the president wants to sow fear and appear tough on illegal immigration by showing off uniformed officers in the field.
...The Republican governors of Arizona and Texas, meanwhile, have kept the full National Guard border deployments in their states. Supporters of the deployment say the back-end assistance from the Guard frees up Border Patrol agents to deal with threats from drug smugglers and human traffickers. Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, they point out, both deployed the National Guard to the border during their presidencies.
The American military cannot conduct domestic law enforcement activities, owing to an 1878 federal law called the Posse Comitatus Act. As a result, the uniformed personnel are helping in the background rather than dealing directly with migrants crossing the border.