The city’s ‘overwhelmed’ mayor asked for help after Texas began busing migrants in Washington, DC
Washington, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser appealed to the Pentagon and the White House for the National Guard to help deal with thousands of illegal migrants being bussed in from Texas and Arizona, but did not received no response, local media reported Thursday. Bowser complained that the capital’s resources were “overwhelmedby arrivals.
Bowser first requested assistance from the National Guard on July 19 in a letter to Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. The second letter was dated July 22 and addressed to the White House, according to NBC affiliate WRC-TV, which job the text of both. The mayor has yet to receive a response to either letter, according to the station.
In the first letter, Bowser notes that Arizona Governor Doug Ducey and Texas Governor Greg Abbott have followed through on their threat to begin sending migrants caught illegally crossing the U.S. border to the nation’s capital. . Pointing out that more than 4,000 migrants had arrived in the district by mid-July, Bowser complained that “The pace of bus arrivals and the volume of arrivals have reached tipping points.”
“Our collective response and service efforts are now overwhelmed: the regional reception center we helped establish in Montgomery County, Maryland is at capacity; our homeless service system is already strained; and tragically, many families arrive in Washington, D.C. with nowhere to go, or they are left in limbo looking for destinations across the United States,” she wrote.
Bowser’s office requested 150 DC National Guard members per day, “use working hours to cover a 24/7 operation”, as well as transportation to shuttle between migrants and the DC Armory “or other appropriate federal location in the National Capital Region”, like Fort McNair or Joint Base Bolling. Their mission “would begin as soon as possible and continue indefinitely until the city relieves them.”
Governors of Texas and Arizona “make a political statement to the federal government, and instead their actions directly impact municipal and regional resources in a way that is unsustainable,” added the mayor.
In his second letter, dated July 22, Bowser demanded that “The cruel political game of the governors of Texas and Arizona must be dealt with at the federal level”, and again requested assistance from the National Guard. She also said the district would use $1 million in emergency federal grants to help “migrants seeking asylum in our country”.
Texas and Arizona border Mexico and are ruled by Republican governors. Both states have complained of a rising tide of migrants crossing illegally into Mexico since Joe Biden was sworn in as president. In early July, a judge in charge of a county in Texas declared a “invasion,” claiming that more than 3.2 million illegal aliens have been apprehended at the border since January 2021 while another 800,000 have avoided capture.
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