Pentagon Will Send Troops To Border To Boost Security, Airlift Out Migrants

The Pentagon is sending at least 1,500 active-duty troops to the southern border to enhance security and assist with a major military airlift of undocumented migrants. 

The deployment, announced by the Defense Department, is the first step in officials’ plans to act on President Donald Trump’s executive order, which uses the military to stem the flow of people illegally crossing the U.S. border.

The Pentagon’s Transportation Command will use military aircraft to send more than 5,000 undocumented immigrants from San Diego and El Paso, Texas, who are detained by Customs and Border Protection, Acting Defense Secretary Robert Salesses said in a statement. The troops also will assist in building new border fences and barriers.

The number of active-duty troops at the border will increase from 2,200 to about 4,000, according to a senior U.S. military official granted anonymity to discuss plans.

The troops include 1,000 Army personnel and 500 Marines. The Marines, who were on standby to provide support for the California wildfires, have been redirected to go to the border, the official said. The troops began moving there earlier today and should arrive later tonight or early in the morning.

“This is the initial effort that we can do right away, and we anticipate many additional missions,” the official said. “This is just the start.”

About 2,200 troops already operate under Joint Task Force-North, the Northern Command’s mission in El Paso, Texas. They work alongside Operation Lonestar, a Texas-led initiative with several thousand Texas Guardsmen and volunteer Guard troops from several other states.

The new forces will do much the same work, providing logistical help, maintenance, drone and helicopter-enabled intelligence and monitoring assistance to the Border Patrol. Active-duty troops are forbidden from conducting law enforcement activities unless the president decides to invoke the Insurrection Act, a 19th-century U.S. law.

Salesses, in his statement, said he directed the Pentagon to establish a task force that included the U.S. Northern Command, U.S. Transportation Command, active duty U.S. military, and the National Guard Bureau.

While the troops will not carry out law enforcement activities, Trump said he would decide within 90 days whether to invoke the Insurrection Act, which would allow them to do so.

Trump’s executive order also called on the U.S. Northern Command, the Pentagon’s military branch in charge of homeland defense, to create a plan in 10 days to address what the White House termed an “invasion” of undocumented immigrants into the U.S.

Some legal experts, though, are concerned this could set up the military to treat unarmed migrants like armed combatants.

“[Trump] seems to be treating migration as if it were in the same way he would treat an armed attack from a foreign government,” said Elizabeth Goitein, a co-director of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law. “He is attempting to sort of shoehorn, essentially, immigration and enforcement into that legal framework.”