Dozens of Iowa National Guard soldiers leaving Iowa today will spend the next six months serving in Washington, D.C..
Last August, President Trump issued an executive order declaring there was an epidemic of crime in the nation’s capitol and he immediately mobilized National Guard troops from the District of Columbia. The Pentagon then started asking state guard units to deploy to D.C. and made a request of Governor Kim Reynolds last year. “They asked earlier and I said no because we had one of the largest deployments that we’ve had for a long, long time and I just felt we were stretched pretty thin,” Reynolds said.
In May of last year, nearly 2000 Iowa National Guard soldiers were deployed to the Middle East. The final group of those soldiers returned to Iowa last month. Reynolds said the Pentagon “circled back” recently and asked her to send a group of Iowa Guard soldiers to D.C. and she’s deployed 120 Iowa Guard soldiers to D.C. “to ensure the safety and security” of people who are in the nation’s capitol, “especially with everything that’s going on with the 250th birthday of our country,” Reynolds said, “and so we were able to participate and do our share.”
Reynolds told reporters the federal government will pay the entire cost of the deployment. Reynolds will speak this morning at a private send off ceremony for the Iowa Guard soldiers before they leave for D.C. There were over 5000 National Guard troops in Washington this past Sunday, including 185 from Nebraska and over 100 from Minnesota.