“This will not be a mission to build a new wall,” Mr. Brown wrote in a letter to Kirstjen Nielsen, the secretary of homeland security, and Jim Mattis, who was secretary of defense at the time.
“It will not be a mission to round up women and children or detain people escaping violence and seeking a better life,” Mr. Brown wrote, adding, “There is no massive wave of migrants pouring into California. Overall immigrant apprehensions on the border last year were as low as they’ve been in nearly 50 years.”
Mr. Newsom and Mr. Brown are both Democrats. So is Governor Grisham of New Mexico, though the predecessor whose deployment decision she reversed was a Republican.
Before the April deployment, there were about 250 National Guard troops serving in California, and 55 of them were stationed at the border. Under federal law, the troops are paid by the federal government but are under the control of the governor. It was not clear whether federal financing for the troops would continue after Mr. Newsom’s redirection order.
Mr. Brown’s letter authorizing the deployment was largely seen at the time as a denunciation of President Trump’s immigration policies, but many activists and elected officials in the state sharply criticized Mr. Brown for agreeing to any guard deployment at all.
Last summer, Kevin De León, who was then the State Senate leader, urged Mr. Brown to “not be complicit” in the administration’s hard-line immigration priorities, which he called “driven by racial animus.” Mr. De Leon, a Democrat, drafted the state law limiting coordination between local authorities and immigration enforcement agents, known colloquially as the “sanctuary state” law, which Mr. Brown signed in 2017.
Despite the criticism, Mr. Brown later extended state authorization for the National Guard presence at the border through March 2019.
Source Article from https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/11/us/california-border-troops.html
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