As we noted earlier this week, Mayor Muriel Bowser of Washington, DC, had become alarmed at what she seems to think are hordes of illegal migrants shipped to her city by the governors of Texas and Arizona. (In actually, the numbers are pretty low. Since April, around 6,000 have been sent from Texas and maybe 1,000 from Arizona. That’s small potatoes if you’re from a border state that is receiving many times that each day.) She was so alarmed by what she called an unfolding “humanitarian crisis,” that she asked the Department of Defense to provide 150 DC National Guardsmen to help deal with it.
Today, August 5, the mayor got her answer: “Request denied,” read a letter from the Pentagon to the mayor’s office:
We have determined providing this support would negatively impact the readiness of the DCNG and have negative effects on the organization and members. . . .
The letter went on to explain that an NGO called SAMU First Response has received funding to handle the tasks Bowser wanted the Guard for.
Mayor Bowser is not getting a lot of love elsewhere, either. Protestors crashed a party she attended at the Navy Yard, and an organizer with a pro-migrant group called the Migrant Solidarity Mutual Aid Network criticized her request, saying that the sight of uniformed personnel might disconcert the illegal migrants. After all, they’ve supposedly already been “traumatized by the military and other law enforcement.” (Getting “traumatized” used to be what criminals expected might happen if they commit a crime; nowadays, it’s a no-no.)
Bowser, for her part, told a press conference she would submit a second request.
For more, see the NY Post.