Governor Greg Abbott should keep the Texas National Guard where it belongs — in Texas.

On October 6, Governor Abbott took 200 Texas guardsmen from their families and jobs and sent them to Chicago, Illinois. In doing so, the governor facilitated a power grab by President Donald Trump.

Abbott’s peers, the governors of Oregon and Illinois, have both objected to the National Guard descending upon the states they represent. In America’s long democratic tradition, the military has only been deployed a handful a times under extraordinary circumstances, such as when President Dwight Eisenhower sent troops to oversee the desegregation of schools in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1957.

The violent image Trump paints of Chicago and Portland do not hold water. In fact, it has been reported that federal agents are causing mayhem: in Chicago, tackling U.S citizens in broad daylight — often in front of their own children; raiding apartment buildings, handcuffing U.S. citizens, and even zip-tying children in the middle of the night; using pepper spray, rubber bullets, and other aggressive tactics to repress peaceful protests. Trump is normalizing these actions to erode our civil rights, and Abbott sent our fellow Texans to help him do it.

Would Governor Abbott stand up for Texans if the roles were reversed? Texans would oppose any other state deploying military forces into our cities. If any other state deployed their National Guard to Texas without our consent, we would call that an invasion of Texas. We must not do the same to Oregon, Illinois or any other American state.

Abbott is exploiting our Texas troops who belong in Texas to serve our communities. Our service members are citizen-soldiers who defend our state and serve overseas when required. They also serve in disasters, such as the catastrophic flooding in July that took the lives of over 100 Texans and in Hurricane Harvey in 2017. Our service members are patriots who volunteer to serve our state to help us respond to emergencies and ensure military readiness — not to be used as political ploys.

Without a compelling justification for the use of federalized National Guard troops from the Trump administration, we fear Abbott’s actions set a dangerous precedent that states can police one another.

Texas and the safety of Texans is our number one priority. We hope that the governor makes it his priority as well.

In her order blocking California troops from deploying to Portland, Judge Karin Immergut — an appointee of Trump to the U.S. District Court in Oregon — noted that based on the facts on the ground, a deployment in Oregon likely violates the U.S. Constitution and other federal laws. On Thursday, Oct. 9, Judge April Perry blocked Trump from deploying the National Guard in Chicago for two weeks. As the litigation proceeds, our service members may remain on standby, outside of Texas. Abbott should have never put them in this position in the first place.

Despite what the president and governor might believe, Trump is not king. This is the United States of America. There are no states in this country that rule over another.  

Deploying the National Guard is undermining our civil liberties and states’ rights. Our governor has abandoned his duty to serve Texans to serve Trump’s illegal and unconstitutional orders. Abbott must recall the deployment of the Texas National Guard instead of allowing Trump to use our service members as political props in his pursuit of authoritarian control.

- Reps. Joaquin Castro, Lizzie Fletcher, Sylvia Garcia, Al Green, Julie Johnson, Greg Casar, Jasmine Crockett, Lloyd Doggett, Veronica Escobar, and Marc Veasey.

View this opinion in the Houston Chronicle.