The National Guard enters The Bob Zadek Show chiefly as an image and a hypothetical rather than as an institution examined on its own terms. Across four episodes spanning 2010 to 2020, guests and host invoke the Guard in arguments about border enforcement, federal-state conflict and the deployment of federal personnel against civilians. The excerpts do not supply the Guard’s founding date, statutory basis or command structure; they show instead how the force is used as a measuring stick for the cost and constitutionality of enforcement policy.
The border cost-benefit argument
The earliest and most developed treatment comes from Gary Johnson, then described by Bob Zadek as a successful two-term Governor of New Mexico and chairman of ouramericainitiative.com. Asked how he would change immigration policy, Johnson framed the question as one of cost-benefit analysis. He asked what it would cost “to put the National Guard arm-in-arm across 1,600 miles of border,” referring to the border with Mexico, and noted that attention would then have to turn to the roughly 2,500-mile border with Canada. His conclusion was that securing the border in that fashion would cost “billions and billions and billions of dollars” Libertarians For Change (2010).
Johnson’s alternative was to make work visas as easy as possible to obtain, with a work visa meaning a Social Security card and payment of taxes including Medicare, Social Security and income tax, and explicitly not welfare benefits. He described three phases—work visa, green card, citizenship—and said only the first was under discussion. For the estimated 15 million illegal immigrants then in the country, he proposed a grace period to sign up for a work visa, after which law enforcement would shift to deportation of those present illegally Libertarians For Change (2010).
Zadek endorsed the approach and pressed his own framing: when people say they oppose illegal immigrants, which of the two words are they focusing on, the illegal part or the immigrant part? He compared enforcement to Prohibition, when everyone was drinking and committing felonies but people did not walk around angry at patrons of speakeasies Libertarians For Change (2010).
The same argument, restated
Johnson returned to the show later in 2010 and restated the border position in nearly identical terms. Building fences across the border and putting the National Guard arm-in-arm across 1,600 miles of border would, in his view, be a whole lot of money spent with very little if any benefit whatsoever A Better America (2010). The repetition is notable: the Guard image functions as a fixed rhetorical set piece in Johnson’s immigration pitch rather than as a proposal he refines.
In this second appearance the numbers shifted. Johnson referred to 11 million estimated illegal immigrants rather than 15 million, and he distinguished his grace period from what he called amnesty, saying that when George Bush talked about amnesty it never meant citizenship. He also tied immigration to the drug war, arguing that legalizing marijuana would arguably dry up about 75% of the border violence with Mexico, and citing an estimate that 75% of Mexican drug cartel activity revolved around marijuana A Better America (2010). The host’s framing was consistent across both episodes: Zadek asked his guests and listeners which part of the phrase illegal immigration they opposed, and in the later episode he extended the point by asking whether opposition was really to the immigration part, in which case he said people should admit it rather than hide behind the word illegal A Better America (2010).
Sanctuary laws and the Guard not yet deployed
By 2018 the Guard appears in a different register. Mitch Jeserich, discussing California’s conflict with the federal government over sanctuary measures, observed that the parties had not even gotten to the issue of deploying the National Guard to the border, and predicted the dispute would only grow more complicated ICE in the Age of Trump (2018). His remark is a marker of timing rather than a description of policy: the litigation he described concerned three California measures—one barring local law enforcement from cooperating with immigration officials, one giving the State Attorney General’s office the right to inspect ICE detention centers, and one penalizing employers who cooperated with the federal government in examining records without a warrant ICE in the Age of Trump (2018).
Jeserich described California as the first state to become what is called a sanctuary state, a development he traced to cities throughout California declaring themselves sanctuary cities on the principle that city law enforcement would not participate with ICE authorities. He noted that Jeff Sessions, the Attorney General, came to the state and announced lawsuits challenging the three laws, and that Libby Schaaf, the mayor of Oakland, had tipped people off before a series of raids in the San Francisco Bay Area ICE in the Age of Trump (2018). The Guard is present in this episode only as an anticipated next step, not as an actor.
Federal personnel and the Portland precedent
The most critical treatment of federal force comes from Pat Eddington in 2020, discussing the deployment of federal agents to Portland. Eddington quoted 40 U.S. Code 1315, on the law enforcement authority of the Secretary of Homeland Security for the protection of public property, and singled out subsection (F), which allows designated officers to carry out such other activities for the promotion of homeland security as the Secretary may prescribe. He called that provision a giant grant of authority, unspecified and without time limitation The “Ratchet Effect” in Real Time (2020).
Eddington described the July 15 incident in which a protester named Mark Pettibone was seized off the streets by what appeared to be Customs and Border Protection personnel, placed in an unmarked van and questioned at the federal courthouse without counsel. He said there was no basis for that approach, that it was not constitutional, and that it violated Pettibone’s First and Fourth Amendment rights at a minimum. He characterized the tactics as being test-bedded on the people of Portland to develop a standard operating procedure for use in other cities The “Ratchet Effect” in Real Time (2020).
The Guard appears in Eddington’s argument as historical context. He said it was not the first time federal officers had been used inappropriately, nor the first time federal personnel, whether law enforcement or federalized National Guard, had been employed against protesters in ways that were clearly unconstitutional and ridiculously violent. He criticized Governor Kate Brown of Oregon for not confronting acting Secretary Chad Wolf when Wolf called to tell her he was about to deploy agents, and listed steps he believed she could have taken, including declaring a state of emergency, ordering Oregon law enforcement to quarantine DHS facilities, directing public utilities to shut off water and electricity to those facilities, and ordering state airports to refuse landing rights to federal aircraft The “Ratchet Effect” in Real Time (2020).
Across episodes
The topic recurs across all four episodes, but the excerpts do not show a single argument developing so much as three distinct uses of the same force. Johnson in 2010 twice used the Guard as a hypothetical cost to be rejected; Jeserich in 2018 noted its deployment as a step not yet taken; Eddington in 2020 placed federalized Guard personnel in a lineage of troops used against protesters. The through-line the excerpts support is thematic rather than chronological: in each case the Guard marks the point at which enforcement becomes militarized, and in each case the speaker treats that militarization as a problem.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not describe the National Guard’s legal foundation, its dual state and federal status, its command arrangements, or any specific Guard deployment in detail. No episode states when the Guard was founded, what statute governs federalization, or how many personnel were involved in any operation. The 2018 reference to deployment is prospective only, and the 2020 reference is historical and general. Nothing in the sources addresses Guard activity outside the immigration and protest contexts discussed here.