While President Donald Trump ratchets up his already-demented fear mongering about undocumented immigration from Central America, newly elected California Gov. Gavin Newsom is preparing to withdraw all of his state’s national guard troops from the U.S.-Mexico border and will declare the president’s saber rattling a “manufactured crisis” in his upcoming State of the State address, NBC news reported on Monday.
The draw-down of the 360 National Guard troops deployed by previous CA Gov. Jerry Brown comes just one week after New Mexico Gov. Michelle Grisham withdrew the bulk of her state’s troops from the border.
According to NBC, Newsom will declare during his address that “California will not be part of this political theater,” and will announce “a new mission” for the soon-to-be relocated soldiers: “They will refocus on the real threats facing our state.”
Those threats will reportedly include anti-drug cartel work, and efforts to fight California’s deadly wildfires.
Newsom’s upcoming order is the latest in the ongoing back and forth over the president’s politicized efforts to militarize the U.S.-Mexico border. Trump currently has several thousand active duty soldiers deployed across a number of border states, where they’ve primarily made themselves useful by setting up concertina wire, and not much else.
Last week the president ordered nearly 4,000 additional troops to the border, and has spent the past month publicly mulling whether or not to declare an extremely unpopular national emergency which he claims would enable him to order the Army Corps of Engineers to start construction on his beloved border wall without congressional approval.
On Monday, the president will hold his first political rally of the new year in El Paso, TX, alongside a portion of an existing fence along the U.S.-Mexico border. It’ll probably be a low-key, dignified affair, right?