Braxton Taylor
Fulfilling a campaign promise by the now-commander in chief, the U.S. military is sending 1,500 more troops to the southwest border, the first of what Pentagon leaders anticipate will be “many additional missions.”
Those troops—1,000 soldiers and 500 Marines—will join some 2,500 troops that have been at the border for months to help build physical barriers and complete other border missions, a senior military official told reporters at the Pentagon on Wednesday. The first missions will commence over the next 24 to 48 hours, the official said.
The Defense Department is also sending helicopters with associated crews and intelligence analysts to bolster surveillance efforts, according to a Jan. 22 statement by Acting Secretary of Defense Robert Salesses.
The military official also said that the Air Force is sending C-17s and C-130s to carry people detained by the Department of Homeland Security out of the country.
The people include “more than five thousand illegal aliens from the San Diego, California, and El Paso, Texas sectors [already] detained by Customs and Border Protection. DHS will provide inflight law enforcement, and the State Department will obtain the requisite diplomatic clearances and provide host-nation notification,” according to the statement.
There are already some 2,500 active-duty troops already giving logistical support to the Border Patrol and other law-enforcement agencies near the border.
The official did not say how many new troops have arrived at the border so far, but said they “had plans for about three companies worth of personnel, so that’s somewhere in the couple-hundred-range who were moving today. I just don’t know if they’ve actually arrived or if it will be sometime overnight or in the morning.”
Asked whether the additional troops will be armed, the official said that decision is left up to the commander of U.S. Northern Command “based on the situation on the ground in different sectors. So we have had troops that have been armed at various times down there. That’s really just based on what the particular security situation is. As of right now, none of the forces that we’re sending are intended to be used for law enforcement.”
This is just the first wave of troops heading to the border, according to a senior defense official, and the department is anticipating “many additional missions” after this.
Salesses’s announcement follows an executive order signed by President Trump on Monday about “the military’s role in protecting the territorial integrity of the United States.” The order gave the defense secretary 10 days to “deliver to the President a revision to the Unified Command Plan that assigns United States Northern Command (USNORTHCOM) the mission to seal the borders…” These orders followed an earlier presidential action that declared the illegal border crossings a national emergency.
DOD has “established a Task Force to oversee expedited implementation of the Executive Orders,” Salesses said in his statement.
Under Trump’s directive, NORTHCOM would be tasked with “repelling forms of invasion including unlawful mass migration, narcotics trafficking, human smuggling and trafficking, and other criminal activities.”
None of the troops at the border have direct law-enforcement roles—a rule that stems from the 19th-century Posse Comitatus Act that generally bars troops from participating in civilian law enforcement. However, Trump could override that law under the 1807 Insurrection Act, which authorizes the president to call out the troops if “any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy” hinders the execution of state or federal law.
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