Defense Secretary James Mattis on Wednesday defended the deployment of thousands of US troops to the border with Mexico, saying the mission was “absolutely legal”…
Defense Secretary James Mattis on Wednesday defended the deployment of thousands of US troops to the border with Mexico, saying the mission was “absolutely legal” and provides good training for war.
Mattis, who visited the troops near the Texas town of Donna along with Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, likened their mission to that of soldiers sent to counter the Mexican revolutionary Gen. Francisco “Pancho” Villa in 1916.
“It’s very clear that support to border police or border patrol is necessary right now,” the Pentagon chief said, noting that was the assessment of the Department of Homeland Security.
While Mattis visited the troops at the southern tip of Texas near the Gulf of Mexico, migrants in a caravan of Central Americans scrambled to reach the US border some 1,500 miles away in Tijuana .
Authorities in the coastal border community were struggling to deal with a group of 357 migrants who arrived aboard nine buses Tuesday and another group about the same size that was approaching Wednesday.
Tijuana’s head of migrant services, Cesar Palencia Chavez, said authorities offered to take the migrants to shelters, but they initially refused.
“They wanted to stay together in a single shelter,” Palencia Chavez said, “but at this time that’s not possible” because shelters are designed for smaller groups.
With a total of three caravans moving through Mexico including 7,000 to 10,000 migrants in all, questions arose as to how Tijuana would deal with such a massive influx, especially given US moves to tighten border security and make it tougher to claim asylum.
The US government said it started work Tuesday to “harden” the border crossing from Tijuana ahead of the caravans.
Mattis declined to provide an estimate of how much the troops’ mission will cost, saying the preliminary figures he has received are “not anywhere near right.”
“Very quickly we’ll know the real cost. So we’ll keep you posted as the real costs come in,” he added.
Mattis said that within a week to 10 days, the 5,800 active duty troops will have accomplished all the tasks initially requested by Customs and Border Protection, though additional tasks are now being worked out between the Pentagon and DHS.
About 2,100 National Guard troops also have been providing border support since April.
Mattis did not say how soon the whole mission might end. Current deployments are scheduled to last until Dec. 15, but that could change.
He told the troops that their mission is to “back up” Customs and Border Protection and Nielsen’s agency — and to ignore the media.
“Now there’s all sorts of stuff in the news and that sort of thing. You just concentrate on what your company commander, your battalion commander tells you,” Mattis said.
“If you read all that stuff, you’ll go nuts… You know what your mission is here. You’ve had to deploy on short notice to a nontraditional location and do your jobs. So you focus on doing that.”
One soldier asked him what are the short- and long-term plans for the military mission.
Mattis said the short-term objective is to get sufficient numbers of wire and other barriers set up along the border as requested by Customs and Border Protection. The longer-term objective, he said, is “somewhat to be determined.”
He said military officers have told him the deployment has been “very good training” for the kind of logistical demands — such as loading planes — that must be met in wartime.
“In terms of readiness, it’s actually, I believe, so far improving our readiness for deployments,” he said.
President Trump, who has described the caravan as an “invasion,” ordered the troop deployment ahead of last week’s midterm elections.
Critics slammed the move as a costly political stunt catering to his conservative base.
“We don’t do stunts in this department,” Mattis said recently.
Asked whether troops’ families should expect their loved ones to remain deployed through Thanksgiving or even Christmas, Mattis declined to speculate.
“We are a 365-day-a-year military. Rain or Shine. Light or dark. Cold weather or hot weather,” he said.
With Post Wires
