President Biden's continued inaction against the deluge of illegal immigration at the Mexican border spurred Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp to act, the Republican told Fox News after publicly pledging more than a dozen guardsmen to be deployed to Texas.
Kemp said the deployment will not happen, however, until a formal request is sent to the Georgia Emergency Management and Homeland Security Agency by Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott.
Despite Mexico being 1,000 miles from the Chattahoochee River at Georgia's westernmost boundary, Kemp said the crisis has intensified under Biden to the point "every state is a border state."
Kemp told "Your World" Tuesday that Georgia guardsmen will set up a forward command post to assist the Texas National Guard's efforts.
GEORGIA POSITIONED TO AID ABBOTT AT BORDER
"We're still waiting for the written request from Texas – we're not going to send them whenever we want to help. We know this is a national issue, and unfortunately, the president could fix this, but he's not acting," Kemp said.
Kemp noted he joined Abbott and about a dozen other governors from states as far into the interior as Nebraska, Utah, Iowa and Arkansas at the Mexican border to see the crisis for themselves.
"We've had people down there since 2019, and I've been down there five times," he said. "I've seen when the federal government and the state governments were cooperating, and saw how successful that was and how it flowed to the tide of illegal immigration and mass migration coming across our southern border."
However, Kemp noted it is not just Texas that shares a boundary with Mexico, telling Fox News the other border state governors have failed to act against the migrant deluge. However, he also underlined the situation is supposed to be a federal issue despite Biden's apparent abdication of responsibility.
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Last year, the congressman whose district encompasses New Mexico's entire Mexican border lashed out at Abbott for ordering the construction of a concertina wire fence with part of his state, where migrants were purportedly crossing the New Mexican border and then traveling into Texas.
Rep. Gabriel Vasquez, D-N.M., called the action "insulting" to his constituents and disrespectful to the city of Sunland Park, N.M., which borders El Paso, Texas and Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua.
New Mexico Democratic Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham announced in 2019 that she was pulling a majority of the then-118 guardsmen from the border, claiming then-President Donald Trump was engaging in a "charade of border fear-mongering," according to NPR.
In California, Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom announced last fall the deployment of additional national guardsmen to four ports of entry within the state, to assist in the interdiction of illegal narcotics, according to a statement from his office.
In Arizona, Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs said in December that she believes the feds are "refusing to do" their job in securing the border, petitioning the Biden administration to reassign national guardsmen to reopen the Lukeville port-of-entry, where a sizable number of border-crossers have been reported in recent weeks.
On Fox News, Kemp added that pressure must be kept up on Biden and his administration in hope of an eventual policy change.
He said Republican governors have spoken about meeting with or offering advice to Biden, but claimed the White House has not taken them up on their offers.
"They don't either they don't get it or they don't want to fix the problem," he said.
Pivoting to the presidential election, Kemp said the contest should not be a "race to the bottom," explaining he meant Republicans should be telling voters what they are "for" and focus on the future in order to win.
"We don't need to just be talking bad about the other side," he said. "We need to give people a reason to vote for us based on issues."
Kemp has long been a foil of Trump's, who called him a "fool and a clown" in the aftermath of the 2020 race, in a critique of Georgia's handling of that election.
During recent remarks at Washington & Lee University in Lexington, Va., Kemp quipped if the "general election becomes a debate about who can outlast the other 80-year-old politician, the American people lose."
However, Kemp told "Your World" he plans to support the eventual GOP nominee.
