Texas Governor Rick Perry appeared on Fox News Sunday to call for the National Guard to the border as a “show of force,” to “send the message” back to Central America. Perry bemoaned the fact that the guardsmen and woman were being diverted from the War on Drugs, while anchor Brit Hume asked him specifically what the border guards would be doing if they couldn’t arrest people.
Perry stated that the United States must stop the flow of immigrants, while Hume pressed him about the perseverance of people who couldn’t be shot or arrested.
HUME: I think nearly everybody agrees with that, Governor, but the question I’m trying to get at with you is this — if these children who undergone these harrowing journeys, to escape the most desperate conditions in their home countries, have gotten this far, are they really going to be deterred by the presence of troops along the border who won’t shoot them and can’t arrest them?
PERRY: And I think we’re talking about two different things here. And what we’re talking about is sending the message back now so we can staunch the bleeding. Those that are already here to address them, to humanitarily take care of them, to make sure that they are safe, process them as quickly as you can to reunite them with their families. That’s the most humanitarian thing that we can do.
And the National Guard is absolutely a trained group of men and women that can address that particular function, one that they should. They’re not there in a vacuum. We have massive amounts of Texas law enforcement now, whether it’s our Texas Ranger recon teams there. You saw some of that on FOX this last week with the boats that we have in the river, the Texas Parks and Wildlife. Those are all law enforcement individuals who can in fact arrest those that have illegally come in and appropriately deal with them.
But more importantly, this is allowing the border patrol to get back to what they are supposed to do. Right now, reports of up to 70 percent of them are taking care of these young people who have come in rather than doing their job of securing the border.
In another interview on Sunday, Governor Perry criticized Senator Rand Paul over his stance on Iraq. Perry rebuked Paul, stating that the United States should be defending the country from the ISIS militants.
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