Why would you spend millions of dollars sending troops to the border who can’t actually detain anyone? That’s what some Texas sheriffs of border towns are asking in the wake of Gov. Rick Perry’s plan to send 1,000 National Guards members to the Texas/Mexico border in the next month, according to the Dallas Morning News. For them, it would be more useful to spend the money on hiring more deputies and police, aka people who are allowed to detain migrants.

“I don’t know what good they can do,” Cameron County Sheriff Omar Lucio told the Dallas Morning News. “You just can’t come out here and be a police officer.” Lucio and other sheriffs said they weren’t consulted before Perry’s announcement and, in Lucio’s opinion, the police and Border Patrol agents were handling the small uptick in crime. “At this time, a lot of people do things for political reasons. I don’t know that it helps,” Lucio said.

via Border Sheriffs Perplexed by Rick Perry’s Plan to Send 1,000 Troops to Stare at Mexico – Yahoo News.

Photo Ops folks.  That’s why he’s doing it.  Politics and photo ops.

Some pretty dang funny ones if you ask me.

And they’re also pretty dang expensive, but fear not Texans.  Rick Perry has a plan to pay for them…

“It is not clear where the money will come from in the budget,” the memo states, adding that Perry’s office has said the money will come from “non critical” areas, such as health care or transportation.

Nice.  Texans get more toll roads and dead people to pay for Perry’s photo ops.  Seems like a fair trade.