THE Pentagon said Wednesday it had begun deploying 1,500 active-duty troops to help secure the south borderimplementing plans President Donald Trump set out in decrees shortly after taking office to repress immigration.
Acting Defense Secretary Robert Salesses said troops would fly helicopters to assist Border Patrol agents and help build barriers. The Pentagon will also provide military aircraft for Department of Homeland Security deportation flights of more than 5,000 detained migrants.
The number of troops and their mission could soon change, Salesses said in a statement. “This is just the beginning,” he said.
“Shortly, the department will develop and execute additional missions in cooperation with DHS, federal agencies and partner states to address the full range of threats outlined by the President at our nation’s borders,” Salesses said .
Defense officials added that the department was prepared to provide many more troops if asked, including up to 2,000 additional Marines.
Officials said there are no plans at this time for troops to enforce the law, which would put them in a dramatically different role for the first time in decades. Any decision on that would be made by the White House, they said.
The active duty forces will join the approximately 2,500 U.S. National Guard and Reserve forces already there. Until this deployment, no active-duty troops worked along the roughly 2,000-mile border.
A few hundred troops began moving toward the border earlier Wednesday, according to a senior military official. The military official and a defense official briefed reporters on condition of anonymity to provide additional details about the deployment. The troops will include 500 Marines from Camp Pendleton in California, and the rest will be the Army.
The U.S. forces used for the deportation flights are separate from the 1,500 deployed for the border mission. These flights will involve four Air Force aircraft based in San Diego and El Paso, as well as crews and maintenance personnel.
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Troops have performed similar tasks in support of Border Patrol agents in the past, when Trump and former President Joe Biden sent active-duty troops to the border.
The law prohibits troops from performing law enforcement duties under the Posse Comitatus Act, but that could change. Trump ordered by executive order that the new secretary of defense and the new head of Homeland Security report within 90 days whether they believe an 1807 law called the Insurrection Act should be invoked. This would allow these troops to be used to enforce civil law on American soil.
The last time this law was invoked was in 1992, during riots in Los Angeles to protest the acquittal of four police officers accused of beating Rodney King.
The highly anticipated deployment, which will take place during Trump’s first week in office, is a first step in his much-vaunted plan to expand the use of the military along the border. In one of his first orders Monday, Trump ordered the defense secretary to develop a plan to “seal the borders” and repel “mass illegal immigration.”
“This is an issue that President Trump campaigned on,” said White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt. “The American people have been waiting for a moment like this – for our Department of Defense to actually get serious about homeland security. This is a No. 1 priority for the American people.
On Tuesday, just as Trump fired Coast Guard commander Admiral Linda Fagan, the service announced it was sending more ships, planes and personnel to the “Gulf of America” — a wink look at the president’s directive to rename the Gulf of Mexico. .
Trump said Monday during his inaugural address: “I will declare a national emergency at our southern border. All illegal entry will be stopped immediately and we will begin the process of returning millions and millions of criminal aliens to the places where they arrived.”
Military personnel have been sent to the border almost continuously since the 1990s to help combat migration. drug trafficking and transnational crime.
In executive orders signed Monday, Trump suggested the military would help the Department of Homeland Security with “detention space, transportation (including aircraft), and other logistical services.”
There are approximately 20,000 border patrol agents, and while most are on the southern border, they are also responsible for protecting the northern border with Canada. Usually, agents are tasked with searching for drug traffickers or people trying to enter the country undetected.
More recently, however, they have had to deal with migrants actively seeking Border Patrol for sanctuary in America, putting a strain on the agency’s staff.
During his first term, Trump ordered active-duty troops to the border in response to a caravan of migrants slowly crossing from Mexico into the United States in 2018. More than 7,000 active-duty troops were sent to Texas, Arizona and California, including military personnel. police, an assault helicopter battalion, various communications, medical and headquarters units, combat engineers, planners and public affairs units.
At the time, the Pentagon was adamant that active-duty troops would not enforce the law. So they spent much of their time transporting Border Patrol agents to and along the border, helping them erect additional vehicle barriers and fencing along the border, assisting them with communications and providing some security to border agent camps.
The military also provided Border Patrol agents with medical care, prepackaged meals and temporary housing.
It was also unclear whether the Trump administration would eventually order the military to use bases to house detained migrants. Defense officials said such a request had not yet been made.
Bases were previously used for this purpose, and after the fall of Kabul to the Taliban in 2021, they were used to accommodate thousands of Afghan evacuees. Facilities struggled to cope with the influx.
In 2018, then-Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis ordered Goodfellow Air Force Base in San Angelo, Texas, to prepare to house up to 20,000 unaccompanied migrant children, but the additional space was not available. ultimately not necessary and Goodfellow was determined not to have the necessary infrastructure. necessary to support the increase in power.
In March 2021, the Biden administration greenlighted the use of property at Fort Bliss, Texas, for a detention center to provide beds for up to 10,000 unaccompanied migrant children while that border crossings from Mexico were increasing.
The facility, run by DHS, was quickly overwhelmed, with far too few case managers for the thousands of children who arrived, exposed to extreme weather and dust and unsanitary conditions, according to a 2022 inspector general report.
—Associated Press writers Aamer Madhani and Rebecca Santana contributed to this report.