Yesterday Texas Governor Rick Perry announced the deployment of 1,000 National Guard troops to the Texas border with Mexico. Last night in an interview with Greta Van Susteren, Texas Attorney General and gubernatorial candidate Greg Abbott stressed that the focus of the troops will be to stop cartels and criminals who have been operating with impunity as Border Patrol resources continue to be overwhelmed.
"This is one of the most important things I can convey. The purpose of adding more boots on the ground is not to address women and children, it's to address this growing reality that a lot of people coming across the border are here for criminal purposes. They're killing, they're raping, they're robbing, they're doing all kinds of harsh criminal activity," Abbott said. "Right now you should consider them [National Guard troops] to be a force multiplier."
Further, Abbott said the federal government and President Obama have "turned their back on Texas," but stressed that this is not simply a Texas issue but instead one that affects the entire country.
"This is a United States of America issue. Look at all of the different states in the country that are reacting to the situation," Abbott said. "The President has turned his back. Remember Greta it was two weeks ago the President was in Austin, Texas just a few hundred miles away from the border and he had his hand out taking money from people for political purposes and he could not trouble himself to go down to the border to see first hand for himself, the catastrophe that he is partly responsible for creating."
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