Texas Governor Rick Perry said on Monday he would add 1,000 Texas National Guard troops to the state's border with Mexico to boost the state's security effort against illegal immigration, according to The Associated Press.
Perry called on President Barack Obama to send the National Guard to the border because "the price of inaction is too high for Texas to pay," the AP reported.
Perry is a vocal critic of the White House's response to the border crisis and said the state has a responsibility to act after "lip service" from the federal government, according to the AP.
He rejected suggestions that Texas was militarizing local communities by putting National Guard troops on the ground or that crime data along the border doesn't justify additional resources, the AP reported.
The deployment will cost Texas an estimated $12 million a month, according to the AP. Texas Adjutant General John Nichols said his troops would simply be "referring and deterring" immigrants and not detaining people.
"We think they'll come to us and say, 'Please take us to a Border Patrol station," Nichols said, the AP reported.
More than 3,000 Border Patrol agents currently work in the region, and Perry has repeatedly asked Obama to send the National Guard to the border. Much of the area has been overwhelmed in recent months by tens of thousands of unaccompanied children illegally entering the U.S, according to the AP.
As governor, Perry is commander in chief of Texas military forces unless those forces have already been mobilized by the White House, but if Perry deploys National Guard troops it is up to Texas to pay for them, while an order from Obama would mean Washington picks up the tab, the AP reported.
"Gov. Perry has referred repeatedly to his desire to make a symbolic statement to the people of Central America that the border is closed," said White House spokesman Josh Earnest, according to the AP. "And he thinks that the best way to do that is to send 1,000 National Guard troops to the border. It seems to me that a much more powerful symbol would be the bipartisan passage of legislation that would actually make a historic investment in border security and send an additional 20,000 personnel to the border."
Earnest also said the White House hasn't received the kind of "formal communication" with Perry's office that usually accompanies such deployments, the AP reported.
