As 400 military police officers from the U. S. Army redeployed to San Diego, the Trump administration approved the use of U. S. troops at the border for law enforcement tasks, permitting them to employ lethal force.
As 400 military police officers from the U. S. Army redeployed to San Diego, the Trump administration approved the use of troops at the border for law enforcement tasks, stating that they are permitted to employ lethal force, according to a White House memo obtained by Newsweek.
The «decision memorandum» was signed by President Donald Trump on Tuesday and ran through Derek S. Lyons, a Harvard-educated lawyer and White House staff secretary to John Kelly, the White House chief of staff and former U. S. Marine general. The documents were obtained from a Defense Department source.
Kelly signed the memo late Tuesday authorizing U. S. service members to perform, “military protective activities,” allowing service members to use, “a show or use of force (including lethal force, where necessary), crowd control, temporary detention, and cursory search,” as determined by Defense Secretary James Mattis to protect agents with Customs and Border Protection.
The news of the memo was first reported by The Military Times on Wednesday morning, but said the president did not sign off on the White House directive. The memo obtained by Newsweek shows Trump signed off on the order to Mattis. ( You can read the full memo at the bottom of this article.)
The White House issued the memo on the same day Newsweek reported that U. S. Army North will shift roughly 400 military police officers from the port of entry in Brownsville, Texas, to the San Ysidro Land Port of Entry in San Diego over the next three days, according to a Defense Department source with knowledge of the southern border mission.
The military police officers will support CBP agents as the initial wave of migrants reaches the California-Mexico border.
President Donald Trump walks off Marine One on the South Lawn of the White House after returning from viewing the damage from the California wildfires, on November 18. Trump signed off Tuesday on the use of deadly force and law enforcement roles for U. S. forces stationed at the southern border. Tasos Katopodis-Pool/Getty Images
A spokesman for U. S. Army North told Newsweek Wednesday morning that they had not received any guidance about the White House memo as the Defense Department would be ironing out the operational particulars of the directive.
Mattis told reporters in a press gaggle at the Pentagon Wednesday that U. S. forces would not violate the Posse Comitatus Act, the 1878 federal statute that restricts the government’s ability to use the U. S. military as a police force.
Under federal law, U. S. troops are allowed to use deadly force in self-defense and to defend other people and property.
However, the rules governing the use of force require that deadly force can be used only when “all lesser means have failed or cannot reasonably be employed,” according to a 2012 Defense Security Cooperation Agency handbook published by Public Intelligence, an online collaborative research project that publishes government documents.
“They are pushing DoD’s authority right up to the line of what is permitted without violating the restrictions of Posse Comitatus. Active duty personnel can respond in self-defense of border officials but the perfect world does not exist in factual reality in which this subjective concept can be neatly applied to the environment of border enforcement,” said Brad Moss, a Washington, D. C. based attorney specializing in national security.
The Military Times reported that Defense officials said the language in the White House directive was carefully crafted to stay within the legal limits established under Posse Comitatus.
However, the areas most vulnerable to Posse Comitatus violations, according to Moss, are U. S. service members participating in crowd control and the detention of migrants.
“That becomes the undefined gray line between emergency circumstances and routine border enforcement,” Moss said. The fine print of when either such behavior is permissible needs to be fleshed out by the government in far more detail.”
“It is virtually guaranteed that the presumed good faith efforts of active duty personnel notwithstanding, there will be several repeated violations of the Posse Comitatus restrictions.”
Kelly’s signed directive said the additional authorities granted to the Defense Department were driven by “credible evidence and intelligence” indicating thousands of migrants arriving at the port of entry near Tijuana, Mexico, “may prompt incidents of violence and disorder” that could threaten border officials.
Since the announcement of troop deployments to the U. S. southern border, reports have questioned the credibility of intelligence touted by DHS and the White House.
On Tuesday, Newsweek confirmed the Department of Homeland Security was actively spying on migrants traveling to the U. S. southern border through paid undercover informants and infiltrated WhatsApp text messaging groups the caravan uses to coordinate.
The information gathered from the informants and text messages is combined with reports from DHS personnel working with the Mexican government, according to NBC News, who first reported the news.
NBC News additionally reported that over the weekend, DHS intelligence assessments indicated that a group of migrants wanted to run through the car lanes of a border crossing near San Diego, prompting CBP to shut down all northbound lanes from 3 a.m. to 6 a.m. The border break-through by migrants never occurred.
Earlier this month, Newsweek reported that the Pentagon had not been briefed on whether there were hundreds of criminal suspects allegedly traveling with the migrant caravan.
Newsweek has been unable to determine how DHS pre-emptively identified at least 270 migrants with criminal backgrounds in the convoy and concluding they are ineligible to request asylum.
On the eve of Thanksgiving, roughly 5,900 active-duty troops and 2,100 National Guard forces are deployed to the U.
