Texas Army National Guard soldiers carry in meals to a hotel near the Alamo in San Antonio, Texas, U.S., June 11, 2025. REUTERS/Kaylee Greenlee
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.”
The officer lamented, “Unless someone does something and grows a backbone in Congress or somewhere else, they’re going to continue to use us as political tools."
The second National Guard member told the outlet that despite some characterizations that Abbott is “being cautious,” the deployment “does strike me as a suppression of free speech ahead of time.”
“Did I swear an oath to the president? Did I swear an oath to the governor?” the member asked. “Or did I swear an oath to our basic, inalienable rights?”