Gov. Rick Perry urged President Obama to deploy 1,000 National Guard troops to southern Texas in a show of force designed to dissuade more Central Americans from crossing the Mexican border the American-Statesman reports.
Perry said the solution should not be spending an additional $3.7 billion in taxes to address the crisis.
“Pick up the phone, be a leader, make a difference,” Perry said on “Fox News Sunday.”
Perry said the problem could have been avoided had Obama heeded the governor’s warnings about the influx in May 2012.
“I gave the President a head’s up on what was happening with these unaccompanied children, these alien children who were coming in on the tops of trains,” Perry told “Face the Nation” host Bob Schieffer. “And we laid out exactly what we felt was going to happen if we didn’t address that, and now we’re seeing that become reality with literally tens of thousands of these young children, making this long, arduous, very dangerous trip, being separated from their parents, and it could have been stopped years ago, had the administration listened, had the administration been focused on the border with Texas.”
