Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee is the latest Republican governor to deploy a contingent of his state’s National Guard troops to the southern U.S. border to help block illegal border crossings.
During a visit to the Texas border town of Eagle Pass last month, Mr. Lee announced his intent to authorize two new rounds of troop deployments to the border. On March 2, he made good on that vow, meeting with a group of 50 Tennessee National Guard soldiers who will take on the border mission.
This troop deployment isn’t the first Mr. Lee has ordered to help protect the border against illegal crossings. Over the past three years, his administration has placed hundreds of troops along the border. Most recently, 125 members of the Tennessee National Guard’s 1175th Transportation Company were deployed in a year-long mission, in which they assisted the U.S. Customs and Border Protection by operating mobile surveillance sites and monitoring surveillance cameras to detect illegal border crossings.
While they’ve provided some assistance for federal-level border missions, several Republican governors also have worked to directly assist Texas Gov. Greg Abbott in a separate border security effort that has often placed him at odds with the Biden administration.
Red States Continue Border Deployments Amid Federal Impasse
The Biden administration has had success getting federal courts to grant them the right to remove physical barriers installed under Operation Lone Star. Questions about border enforcement remain pending before the federal court system, but in January, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Biden administration could continue removing these physical barriers. Even after that ruling, Mr. Abbott has continued ordering the installation of new physical barriers along the southern border.
Mr. Lee is among 25 Republican governors who pledged in January to continue assisting Operation Lone Star in the face of setbacks in the federal courts.
In recent months, President Joe Biden and Congress entertained talk of new border security efforts, but no deal has been reached. In October, the president outlined a $13.6 billion border security request, which he attached to a larger $106 billion supplemental spending bill that included about $61 billion in additional Ukraine-related funding, $14.3 in Israel-related funding, and billions more for humanitarian aid projects and alliance-building in the Indo-Pacific region.
The border security provisions of President Biden’s supplemental laid out funding to hire 1,300 additional Border Patrol agents, 1,600 new asylum officers, and 375 new judge teams, along with funding for new technology to detect drug smuggling. Throughout the Biden administration, many Republicans have attributed the surge in border crossings to changes in border enforcement policy made by the Biden administration. Those Republicans countered President Biden’s border spending proposal with calls to adopt more stringent policies governing when people arriving at the border can claim asylum and be released into the United States with pending immigration claims.
Senate negotiators released a nominally bipartisan proposal for some border and immigration policy changes, but many congressional Republicans rejected the deal as insufficient. The Biden administration has blamed congressional Republicans for rejecting what it characterized as a tough immigration bill, and it accused those Republicans of working at the behest of former President Donald Trump, the front-runner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, to leave the border security issue unresolved before this year’s election.
“Congressional Republicans killed the toughest, fairest bipartisan border security deal in a generation,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said in a Feb. 14 news conference after the Senate border deal collapsed. Ms. Jean-Pierre suggested that President Trump’s criticism of the Senate border proposal was the reason the bill failed to garner Republican support.
