New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu said Monday that he is sending two Army National Guard units to the southern border for a one-year deployment to help handle the chaos of the current migrant surge.
Mr. Sununu becomes the latest to announce a deployment, signaling fealty with fellow Republicans in what has become a deep dividing line in American politics.
He labeled the border an “ongoing humanitarian crisis.”
Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, the two Republican governors on the southern border, have been busing migrants out of their states for months, forcing Democratic-led states and cities to grapple with a small fraction of the migrant surge.
Those Democrats have alternated between anger at the GOP governors and expressing an openness to the newcomers being shipped into their jurisdictions.
All sides have expressed disappointment with the Biden administration.
New Hampshire said it will deploy more than 160 soldiers from military police units.
They will help supervise other guard units and will man surveillance posts along the border. They are prohibited from coming into contact with illegal immigrants, instead reporting their observations to Customs and Border Protection agents and officers.
Mr. Sununu deployed guard troops to the border in October 2020, at the end of the Trump administration.
That marked a reversal of sorts for the governor, who in 2018 said he would have refused a request from the Trump administration to deploy guard troops amid the “zero tolerance” border policy that led to family separations.
• Stephen Dinan can be reached at sdinan@washingtontimes.com.
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