'Doesn't make any sense': Guardsmen blast MAGA governor over protest deployment [View all]
Source: Raw Story
June 13, 2025 9:23PM ET
Gov. Greg Abbott's (R-TX) decision to activate thousands of National Guard troops for protests has left guardsmen scrambling, with at least one officer slamming the move as senseless.
Abbott said more than 5,000 Texas National Guard troops — along with over 2,000 state police officers — were deployed across the state ahead of what's expected to be large-scale protests against federal immigration raids and President Donald Trump’s actions. Nationwide "No Kings" protests were scheduled for the weekend, including in Houston, Austin, Dallas, and San Antonio.
The Austin American-Statesman reported Friday afternoon that internal memos showed military leaders were forced to scramble to find and train enough personnel for their new orders. Of the 5,000, half were pulled off a border security mission. The memos illustrated what the report characterized as a "potentially rushed timeline for training on crowd control and de-escalation methods."
Two Guardsmen expressed serious concerns to the newspaper over the deployment, including an officer who said they should "never have been mobilized in the first place." “I was shocked that they were mobilizing the amount of people that they were mobilizing,” the officer told the Statesman. “It doesn’t make any sense to me why we would be activated in such large numbers against the citizens we’re sworn to protect.”
Read more: https://www.rawstory.com/texas-national-guard/
REFERENCE - https://www.democraticunderground.com/10143476160
(as a note, the referenced article at the "Austin American-Statesman" is completely paywalled - https://www.statesman.com/story/news/politics/state/2025/06/13/internal-documents-show-texas-national-guard-scrambling-to-find-trained-soldiers-for-protests/84193242007/)
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