The new crop of troops who will be deployed by Saturday will join the roughly 2,100 National Guard forces already operating – primarily in logistics and background support missions – on the southern border in support of U. S. Customs and Border Protection agents.
WASHINGTON — The Pentagon will deploy 5,200 active-duty troops to the U. S.-Mexico border to help curb illegal immigration, officials said Monday following President Donald Trump’s repeated warning that migrants in southern Mexico making their way toward the United States pose a national security threat.
Already Monday, some 800 active-duty troops were on their way to Texas to “harden the southern border,” said Air Force Gen. Terrance O’Shaughnessy, the chief of U. S. Northern Command. The new crop of troops who will be deployed by Saturday will join the roughly 2,100 National Guard forces already operating – primarily in logistics and background support missions – on the southern border in support of U. S. Customs and Border Protection agents.
“Our concept of operations is to flow in our military assets with a priority to build up southern Texas and then Arizona and then California to reinforce points of entry to enhance CBP’s ability to harden and secure the border… by providing robust military capabilities,” the general said.
The massive deployment – about five times more troops than Pentagon officials indicated they initially planned to send last week – would bring to the border a military force roughly equal to the U. S. military deployment in Iraq and Syria to fight the Islamic State. The Pentagon has about 5,200 troops in Iraq and 2,000 in Syria, the amount that it has maintained in those countries through the vast majority of the ISIS fight launched in 2014.
Department of Homeland Security officials requested the new deployment of military forces, specifically citing the loosely organized group of some 3,500 Central American migrants now walking by foot in southern Mexico toward the United States. The group made up largely of women and children who have said they seek refugee status remain some 1,000 miles from the U. S. border, according to The Associated Press.
Nonetheless, Trump has repeatedly warned the group posed a national security threat to the United States, and he tweeted Monday it included “Many Gang Members and some very bad people.”
The “Military is waiting for you!” the president also tweeted.
CBP Commissioner Kevin McAleenan warned Monday that other similar caravans were being organized in Central America.
“We are preparing for the contingency of a large group of arriving persons intending to enter the United States in the next several weeks,” McAleenan told reporters Monday afternoon in a briefing alongside O’Shaughnessy. “We will not allow a large group to enter the United States in an unsafe and unlawful manner.”
The new deployment will consist largely of engineering, aviation, medical and planning specialists, O’Shaugnessy said. However, it will also include an armed contingent of military police officers, including soldiers of the 89th Military Police Brigade from Fort Hood in Texas.
Despite carrying weapons, the MP forces would not be authorized to conduct law enforcement operations, an activity that would be barred under the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act. That law bans the use of American military personnel for civilian law enforcement efforts on U. S. soil, outside military installations.
Earlier Monday, White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said the Trump administration was “looking at a number of different options” when she was asked if the president was considering suspending that act.
O’Shaughnessy seemed to put to rest any speculation that military troops would conduct unprecedented operations at the southern border under the impending deployment.
“Everything we are doing is in line with and in adherence to Posse Comitatus,” the general said.
Like the National Guard members who have been supporting CBP efforts at the border since April, the 5,200 deploying troops are not expected to interact with migrants. Instead, their mission will be largely to support and enable CBP agents to conduct their law enforcement duties.
Among soldiers deploying will be Army Corps of Engineers personnel and three battalions of Army combat engineers who will focus on such operation as building temporary barriers along the border and constructing shelters to house a potential influx of CBP agents, O’Shaughnessy said.
It will also include an influx of military aviation units who will be tasked with ferrying CBP agents along the border with helicopter and airplanes, he said.
McAleenan said the influx of military personnel was necessary to deter migrants from attempting to enter the United States illegally. However, some lawmakers dismissed the new deployment as a political stunt by the White House just a week before the Nov. 6 midterm elections.
Washington state Rep. Adam Smith, the ranking Democrat for the House Armed Services Committee, said Trump’s announcement last week that he would use the military along the southern border was “fundamentally wrong” and a “political act.”
“We should not be militarizing the border, and President Trump has offered no clear idea of what our forces are going to do there,” Smith said Thursday. “We have seen no evidence that it was helpful or effective when he sent the National Guard to the border in April.”
Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., who has been a vocal opponent of Trump’s immigration policies, voiced his objection Monday to deploying more than 5,000 troops.
“The migrant caravan is full of women and children fleeing violence, poverty, and government repression,” Markey tweeted Monday. “Sending thousands of troops to turn them away as if they are foreign invaders reflects the profound paranoia, fear, and hate fueling this administration’s immigration policies.”
Rep. Mac Thornberry, R-Texas, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, said Friday that the move was consistent with actions taken by past presidents.
“A fundamental responsibility of any country’s government is to control who and what comes across its border. Allowing thousands of people to cross America’s southern borders in contravention of our laws is not a sustainable solution to the difficult conditions driving people out of their homes and countries in Central America,” Thornberry said in a statement.
