Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, ripped the Biden administration’s handling of the ongoing illegal immigration crisis and ordered her state’s National Guard to deploy troops to the southern border Friday.
In a statement Friday explaining her executive order, Hobbs said the Biden administration has “refused” to aid Arizona after the state’s “continued requests for assistance” to secure the border. Hobbs signed the order after the federal government closed a port of entry in Arizona earlier this month to send Customs and Border Protection agents to other parts of the southern border, AZ Central reported.
The governor’s order said the Biden administration’s decision to close the port of entry has led to an “unmitigated humanitarian crisis,” putting “Arizona’s safety and commerce at risk.”
“Yet again, the federal government is refusing to do its job to secure our border and keep our communities safe,” Hobbs said in a statement. “With this Executive Order, I am taking action where the federal government won’t. But we can’t stand alone, Arizona needs resources and manpower to reopen the Lukeville crossing, manage the flow of migrants, and maintain a secure, orderly and humane border. Despite continued requests for assistance, the Biden administration has refused to deliver desperately needed resources to Arizona’s border.”
It was not immediately known how many National Guard troops the state will deploy to the border as the governor leaves that decision up to Arizona’s chief National Guard official, Adjutant General Kerry Muehlenbeck, along with the state Department of Emergency and Military Affairs, according to AZ Central. The Guard troops will assist local law enforcement with tracking down fentanyl and human traffickers along with other “enforcement activities,” per the governor’s order.
Arizona’s Tucson sector of the border, which covers most of the state, has turned into the busiest section of the southern border, The New York Times reported earlier this week. Illegal immigrant encounters in the Tucson sector more than doubled in October compared to last year with CBP agents encountering 55,224 migrants in October 2023 compared to 22,938 encounters in October 2022.
With her executive order, Hobbs joins a growing list of governors seeking to curb the record number of illegal border crossings that have occurred under President Joe Biden’s watch. In October, Texas Governor Greg Abbott announced that the state was building sections of border wall in some counties, becoming “the first and only state in U.S. history to build its own border wall.” A month before that, 25 Republican governors demanded that Biden take more action to address the porous southern border as millions of illegal immigrants make their way into the U.S. with many traveling to cities and states across the country.
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Hobbs isn’t the first Democratic politician to harshly criticize the Biden administration’s handling of the illegal immigration crisis. New York Governor Kathy Hochul along with New York City Mayor Eric Adams have repeatedly pushed the president to do more to end the border crisis as illegal immigrants flood the Big Apple and cost the city and state millions of dollars.