Perry will use Emergency Funds to Send National Guard to Border

Texas Governor, Rick Perry announced that he will use $38 million in emergency funds to start deploying National Guard troops to the border to address the surge of child migrants trying to enter the United States from Central America.

According to spokesman Rich Parsons, the money will come from an existing but unused fund for emergency radio infrastructure from the Department of Public Safety, he said Saturday.

Since September of 2013, over 57,000 child migrants have tried to enter the U.S. without legal papers, many of whom try to enter via the Texas-Mexico border. This has caused a humanitarian crisis at the border, and the surge of migrants has strained Border Patrol resources.

Perry's plan is expected to cost $12m a month, so the proposed budget would fund the first few months of the mission before they seek longer term legislative changes.

Last week, Perry announced plans to use his powers as Governor and send 1,000 National Guard troops to the border, but did not give details of how they would be funded or what their role would be exactly.

Democrats have critiqued his deployment of the National Guard at the border as being wasteful, and badly planned since no budget, goals, necessities or mission effectiveness had been discussed or laid out.

The announcement comes just after the House of Representatives voted last week to deny President Barack Obama's request for $3.7billion to address the issue at the border. The money would have been used to hire more border guards and immigration lawyers, create more detention centers and increase aerial surveillance in the area. Republicans instead voted to allot Obama only $656m.