Florida’s Governor is teasing an expansion of the mission for his State Guard, suggesting they may make a run for the border.
To be clear, that’s the Texas-Mexico Border, and not Florida’s border with Georgia to the north.
At a news conference, Ron DeSantis spent roughly seven minutes making a case for deployment as long and winding as the Rio Grande River itself, saying that if Florida needs to “stand up and, and, and ensure the sovereignty of the country, then, then we need to do that,” and that “they can count on me to help from the state of Florida.”
“We’ve got (the Florida Highway Patrol), Fish and Wildlife. We’ve had (the National Guard). We may do more National Guard, but we also would be willing to do the Florida State Guard. And the reason why you would want to do the State Guard is because the President would not be able to federalize the State Guard,” he said Friday at a school in Kissimmee.
DeSantis said that the State Guard, which he said was formed as a reaction to COVID-19 vaccine mandates, was a better bet because it allows him to “control your own destiny” regarding where deployed troops go.
“I mean, the federal government will grab our National Guardsmen and they’ll send them all over the world,” the Governor groused.
“So why should we just have people just get plucked out of here to be doing whatever these guys in Washington want? If these are people serving the state, you know, we want to be able to have control over that.”
DeSantis made the case that the State Guard was necessary for sovereignty in the face of Washington’s dictates.
“If we have the Florida State Guard and other states have their own state guards, then that’s not something that (Joe) Biden could just simply federalize,” DeSantis said.
“And I don’t know if it’s going to come to this, but just think about what does that say to the American people, if you are federalizing the Texas National Guard in order to take barricades down from the border to let more people come in illegally,” he added, regarding a SCOTUS decision barring the state of Texas from blocking federal actions at the Mexican border.
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