The deployment of thousands of soldiers on the border between the United States and Mexico promoted by the governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, has been criticized by Democratic legislators, and even by members of the National Guard, cataloging this movement as overtly political and a waste of state resources.
In March of 2021, Governor, who is running for re-election, undertook “Operation Lone Star”, which was created under the premise that there was a crisis on the southern border of the United States, whose procedure is supported by the resources of the Texas Department of Public Safety and the Texas National Guard and generated the increase to more than 10,000 service members.
Part of the criticism of the operation It is based on the fact that due to the speed with which it was promoted, it was creating internal frustrations among the veterans of the Guard, and describing in that its members were subjected to long hours of work with little activity to do, as well as poor planning and lack of mission, and has resulted in a low morale among the soldiers.
“As a military man, people know the term ‘hurry up and wait.’ This is just the biggest hurry up and wait thing I’ve ever been a part of, and there’s really no set thing; ‘hey, we’re doing this’, or ‘hey, go out and do this’. It’s just that we’re sitting around doing nothing”, a soldier complained.
To 2021, some Republican rulers sent state agents to the border as a show of loyalty to former President Donald Trump, in addition to raising criticism of the Biden Administration.
In the case of Texas, Abbott has been one of the main governors critical of the current government, and has attributed the increase in immigrants at the border to Biden’s immigration policies, despite the fact that there were also high peaks during Trump’s mandate.
Texas had to deal with a wave of mostly Haitian migrants in September of last year waiting to be processed under a bridge and in dire need of resources, marking a turning point for border arrests, which have been remained high since that migratory wave.
In the Del Río sector, the Border Patrol completed more than 19,000 detentions of migrants in December of 2021, a figure that exceeds that of 2020 according to the latest available data, since by December of that year they stopped a little less than 9, 200 people and in 2019, the year before the pandemic the figure was just 3, 10.
Generally, the National Guard performs the function of supporting and notifying the Border Patrol if they have encountered migrants so that the agents end up looking for them.
“There are guys standing at our points doing nothing, so they don’t really see a mission. They only see this as if they were just using us as political pawns for an election year,” the soldier stressed.
He added that he has seen many soldiers collapse and have a drastic change in attitude, and attributes it to low morale and poor mental health.
Other of the most common complaints have been the reduced spaces that have generated COVID-19 infections among soldiers , lack of proper equipment, and late paychecks.
According to an audio received by CNN, one of the problems in “Operation Lone Star” was that the soldiers had to exchange equipment for each person, as well as insufficient tools and poor working conditions.
These types of complaints have led Texas civil groups to file a federal discrimination complaint with the Department of Justice in December in relation to the operation, which they described as illegal, xenophobic and racist.
With information from CNN