The southern border is once again unmanned after the National Guard soldiers and state police sent by multiple governors to assist with the border crisis withdrew this past week.
Earlier this summer, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott requested aid from several states as hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants flooded the region.
Florida, Iowa, Nebraska and Ohio all sent state troopers, and Arkansas and South Dakota sent state National Guard soldiers.
But over the past four months, those reinforcements have gradually been called back.
Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds said her state could not continue to pay for the additional costs, according to the Washington Examiner, and the other governors said their states need the law enforcement presence back in their own communities.
Now, just 11 soldiers from outside Texas remain at the southern border, which means no one is manning large swathes of the border.
Border Patrol agent Chris Cabrera told the Examiner they sometimes don’t even know who is crossing the border and when they are crossing, since so many Border Patrol agents have been called away from the border to transport and process detained illegal immigrants to detention facilities.
Having out-of-state back-up helped Border Patrol immensely, Cabrera said.
“They would monitor the mobile center, mobile tower trucks, camera trucks,” Cabrera said.
“Nobody is bringing those out because they’re not there,” he continued. “These were static positions where we would put a vehicle and two guardsmen in there so if somebody ran across that area, they could call it out.”
Abbott has blasted the Biden administration for not sending additional federal enforcement and leaving Texas to fend for itself.
“The crisis at our southern border continues to escalate because of Biden administration policies that refuse to secure the border and invite illegal immigration,” he said earlier this year.
“Texas supports legal immigration but will not be an accomplice to the open border policies that cause, rather than prevent, a humanitarian crisis in our state and endanger the lives of Texans,” he continued. “We will surge the resources and law enforcement personnel needed to confront this crisis.”
