The Pentagon rejected a second request by Washington, D.C., mayor Muriel Bowser on Monday to deploy the National Guard to “help prevent a prolonged humanitarian crisis in our nation’s capital resulting from the daily arrival of migrants.”
Bowser has twice requested — once in July and again on August 11 — that the National Guard be activated as Texas and Arizona send busloads of migrants to the district. Texas has sent some 7,000 migrants to D.C. since April.
The Pentagon rejected the mayor’s first request on August 4. Defense Department executive secretary Kelly Bulliner Holly then sent a second rejection letter to Bowser on Monday explaining that the D.C. National Guard is not trained to assist migrants, according to a copy of the letter obtained by several media outlets.
“The DCNG has no specific experience in or training for this kind of mission or unique skills for providing facility management, feeding, sanitation or ground support,” the letter read.
“Approval of this request would also result in a substantial readiness impact to the DCNG,” Holly said. “Devoting the personnel or the facility for such an extended mission would force the cancellation or disruption of military training.”
The letter noted several non-government organizations and civilian groups are assisting with the arrival of migrants.
The mayor argued last month that the “pace of arriving buses and the volume of arrivals have reached tipping points.”
“Our collective response and service efforts have now become overwhelmed. … Tragically, many families arrive in Washington, DC with nowhere to go, or they remain in limbo seeking onward destinations across the United States,” she wrote.
In her initial requests for help on July 19 and July 22, she also asked for permission to use the D.C. Armory as a processing center, according to copies of the letters shared by NBC Washington.
The mayor wrote in her letters that the federal government must provide “immediate federal assistance” because immigration is a federal issue.
She requested 150 personnel to help transport migrants to the D.C. Armory where the mission would help the illegal immigrants on their “eventual movement to their final destinations,” Bowser wrote.
In July, Bowser told CBS’s Face the Nation that D.C. officials have “called on the federal government to work across state lines to prevent people from really being tricked into getting on buses.”
“We think they’re largely asylum seekers who are going to final destinations that are not Washington, D.C.,” she said. “I worked with the White House to make sure that FEMA provided a grant to a local organization that is providing services to folks. I fear that they’re being tricked into nationwide bus trips when their final destinations are places all over the United States of America.”