Several hundred National Guard members are now posted up along the U.S. Mexico border.
Texas alone has already deployed 250 members and on Monday, Governor Greg Abbott announced he would boost that number to at least 1,000.
One North Texas man said he’s ready and waiting for the call to protect his adoptive country for a second time.
“I definitely didn’t expect to be on the border one day,” said U.S. Army Specialist Salvador McCaffrey.
As a National Guard member, McCaffrey has gotten used to expecting the unexpected.
“I pretty much got a call and within a week we were down on the border,” he said.
McCaffrey was among 6,000 troops deployed to the border in 2006 under the Bush administration.
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“I thought I was just going to be standing there with a gun and just waiting for people to cross,” he said. “But it was actually a very well-coordinated mission with the border patrol and we were just there as a support element more than anything.”
He spent one year in the Big Bend region as an intelligence analyst gathering information for border patrol agents on the ground.
“That allowed a border patrol agent to go back out in the field to be able to do the missions they were able to do,” said McCaffrey.
He spent eight years serving at home and abroad during natural disasters and war.
“It was Katrina, border and then Operation Iraqi Freedom,” he said.
McCaffrey, 30, chose to re-enlist in February.
“You’re going in and you’re helping your nation,” he said.
The sense of pride comes from a young man who was born in Mexico but adopted in North Texas when he was just three-years-old along with his sister.
“For me, my country is the United States,” he said. “It’s afforded me a lot of experiences and opportunities that I wouldn’t have had probably still being in Mexico and I’ve just taken that opportunity and just made the best of it.”
President Trump has said he would like to send between 2,000 and 4,000 National Guard members to the border until progress is made on his proposed border wall between both nations.
Funding has been approved through September, according to government officials.
Texas plans to send more members to the Texas-Mexico border in the coming weeks, but will government officials will not detail how many, where to and for how long calling it an “evolving mission.”
The number of undocumented migrants caught crossing into the U.S. illegally through the Southwestern border has started to climb after plunging at the beginning of the Trump presidency.
However, the number of illegal crossings is still well below the number of crossings at the time Presidents Bush and Obama deployed the Guard.
