Parson wants ‘boots on the ground’ at southern border. MO National Guard is already there

Missouri Gov. Mike Parson late Sunday said he plans to put “boots on the ground” in Texas, criticizing President Joe Biden’s handling of immigration issues at the southern border with Mexico.

“The president and what’s going on in Washington, D.C. is not going to be able to help secure the border at this point,” Parson, a Republican, said in a video posted to social media.

The vague announcement comes as Republicans across the country have sought to draw attention to the U.S.-Mexico border ahead of the 2024 presidential election. Parson didn’t provide specifics and his office didn’t respond to questions Monday.

Roughly 250 Missouri National Guard members are already deployed to the southern border. But the National Guard members are working with the Biden administration – a fact that went unmentioned by Parson in the video.

Two companies, from Festus and Harrisonville, deployed to the border late last year to assist the U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s work along the southern border, a Missouri National Guard spokesperson confirmed. The deployment came after U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin in June authorized the mobilization of up to 2,500 service members nationally, including National Guard members, to assist the federal customs agency at the southern border, the spokesperson said.

“Approximately 250 service members are providing mission enhancing support to CBP’s border security operations to enable CBP agents to conduct their law enforcement mission more efficiently,” the spokesperson said.

The two Missouri National Guard companies had departure ceremonies in late October.

Parson’s office did not respond to questions about his plans for sending more personnel to Texas. His announcement video also did not provide specifics.

“Tomorrow, we will start the process of working with Operation Lone Star to be able to put boots on the ground and being able to help even more than what we already have,” he said in the video. “We currently have National Guard members in Texas, but we’re currently going to do more to help Operation Lone Star.”

Parson made the announcement after returning from a weekend trip to Texas, where he met with Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott and 13 other GOP governors. Since 2021, Abbott has promoted a plan dubbed “Operation Lone Star” that uses Texas state resources to combat illegal border crossings.

Operation Lone Star is a Texas initiative and separate from federal border enforcement activities. The dual efforts, which include a dispute between Texas and the federal government over the use of razor wire, have escalated into a broader standoff between state and federal officials.

A spokesperson for Parson told Spectrum News on Monday that the governor’s video did not explicitly promise additional National Guard members and that Missouri could send other personnel or resources.

The governor’s border visit comes as Republicans have made the southern border a key issue in the 2024 presidential election, attacking Biden for his handling of immigration. Federal agents have reported more than 285,000 encounters at the border from October through December, according to federal data.

Missouri House Majority Leader Jonathan Patterson, a Lee’s Summit Republican, said House Republicans supported Parson possibly sending additional personnel to assist Texas. He called crossings at the southern border a “humanitarian and national security issue.”

“This is an issue that I think is, more and more, gaining bipartisan support,” Patterson said. “When you have migrants ending up in cities, there isn’t a place for them to stay and the healthcare apparatus to support the numbers that we’re seeing.”

A bipartisan group of U.S. senators on Sunday unveiled a $118 billion bill that seeks to implement stricter border and immigration policies. But the bill faces opposition from some conservatives who argue it doesn’t go far enough and aren’t eager to give Biden a political win ahead of the election.

House Minority Leader Crystal Quade, a Springfield Democrat, criticized Parson in a statement, arguing that he should be focused on issues in Missouri such as the hundreds of jobs lost after an aluminum smelter recently closed in the southeastern part of the state.

“I bet the 500 folks in the bootheel that lost their jobs a couple weeks ago would rather have the governor focusing on that, instead of wasting tax payer money to fly to TX for a photo op,” Quade, who is running for governor, said in a text message.

“There is a federal bipartisan negotiated bill on the table for the members of Congress. Our governor should be focused on Missouri and saving those jobs.”

Missouri Senate Minority Leader John Rizzo, an Independence Democrat, in a statement called on Republicans in Congress to pass the border security bill and neither criticized nor defended Parson sending additional personnel to Texas.

“The Governor has the authority to send the Missourian National Guard wherever they are needed most,” Rizzo said. “More importantly, I hope the Governor is also urging his fellow Republicans in Congress to quickly pass the bipartisan border security bill to finally address this crisis.”

State Rep. Ashley Aune, a Kansas City Democrat and one of only two Hispanic lawmakers in the House, painted Parson’s trip to Texas as “political theater” in a statement on Sunday.

In a follow up text to a reporter on Monday, Aune specifically criticized Parson for tying the fentanyl crisis ravaging across the country to illegal immigration. Aune pointed to a report from the Cato Institute, a Libertarian think tank, that used 2021 sentencing data to show that a large majority of convicted fentanyl traffickers were U.S. citizens compared to undocumented immigrants.

“Missouri has plenty of challenges,” Aune wrote, but Parson “is scapegoating immigrants to distract from his inability or unwillingness to actually address them.”