A soldier with the South Dakota National Guard stands near the banks of the Rio Grande in Eagle Pass on Sept. 11, 2023. (Photo by Justin Hamel)More than a dozen Republican governors gathered in Eagle Pass in February, heeding a call from Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to confront what he labeled “President Joe Biden’s border crisis.” The governors, along with other GOP state leaders, vowed to send another round of National Guard troops from their states to the Texas-Mexico border.With shifts in pandemic-era federal border policies, there’d been a sharp increase in migrant encounters in the latter half of 2023. But then January saw a steep 50% drop.Still, the governors told their constituents that they needed to send more people to assist Texas in fending off an “invasion,” as both Abbott and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis have called it, or fight drug smuggling. But the deployments have been widely criticized as political grandstanding — opportunities to take photos near personnel in uniform on the border while feeding nationalism and fear during an election year.States Newsroom outlets across the country have tracked state deployments and expenses so far this year as part of a collaboration with Texas Tribune and Stateline to get a sense of what becomes of these promises, and what those deployments look and feel like at the border.!function(){"use strict";window.addEventListener("message",(function(a){if(void 0!==a.data["datawrapper-height"]){var e=document.querySelectorAll("iframe");for(var t in a.data["datawrapper-height"])for(var r=0;r