In contemporary Republican politics, there’s an expectation that ambitious GOP officials will spend a fair amount of time at the U.S./Mexico border. But especially ambitious Republican governors go further, deploying National Guard troops to the border, which in turn makes it easier to boast to partisan audiences about their efforts.
It was against this backdrop that Gov. Glenn Youngkin announced in the spring that he was deploying troops to Texas. The Virginia Republican — who’s taken a variety of steps to raise his public profile outside of the commonwealth — faced immediate pushback from critics who said he was using the Guard for political purposes, but the governor insisted that the mission had merit.
Due to the “unmitigated danger posed by the increasing drug supply exacerbating the fentanyl crisis and the impact of criminal activity in the Commonwealth, Virginia will do its part to assist the State of Texas’ efforts,” Youngkin declared in May.
How’d that work out? WRC-TV, the NBC affiliate in Washington, D.C., took a closer look.
The [News4 I-Team] reviewed daily summaries of the guard’s nearly $2 million mission and found that, over roughly three weeks, they referred about 1,800 people to border authorities for illegal crossings and 145 people to police. But the reports also show the guard didn’t encounter fentanyl at any point and experienced what one commander described as a “weakening of the deterrent effect of our Soldiers and Airmen” on migrants and alleged human traffickers.
The report added that the NBC affiliate relied on an open-records request to obtain invoices and daily “situation reports” detailing the Guard’s deployment to Eagle Pass, Texas. “None of the reports, which outline what the guard observed each day, indicates troops encountered or seized fentanyl,” WRC-TV reported.
It’s not exactly a secret that the vast majority of illicit fentanyl is stopped at border points-of-entry, but Youngkin nevertheless deployed Guard troops to spots along the Rio Grande River in order to address “the fentanyl crisis.”
Not surprisingly, this didn’t work. Troops came across people trying to enter the United States, but didn’t find fentanyl. The local station quoted Scott Surovell, a Democratic state senator in Virginia, who made the case that the resources the GOP governor invested in the mission could have instead been spent on drug enforcement squads, as well as treatment and prevention programs. “I can think of a lot better ways to spend $2 or $3 million to help address the fentanyl problem,” Surovell said. “I’m just disappointed that our National Guard troops are being used like this. They’re not political pawns.” If recent history is any guide, Youngkin is likely to brag about all of this anyway the next time he speaks to a partisan audience, but those who care about consequences should keep these details in mind.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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