The Pentagon will begin deploying up to 1,500 active-duty troops to help secure the southern border in the coming days, the White House confirmed Wednesday, setting in motion plans laid out by President Donald Trump in executive orders shortly after taking office to crack down on immigration.
Acting Defense Secretary Robert Celsius was expected to sign the deployment orders on Wednesday, but it was not yet clear which troops would go, and the total number could fluctuate. It remains to be seen whether they will end up doing law enforcement, which would put US forces in a completely different role for the first time in decades.
“This is something that President Trump campaigned on,” said Carolyn Leavitt, White House press secretary. “The American people have been waiting for a time like this — for our Department of Defense to take homeland security seriously. This is the No. 1 priority of the American people.
Active duty troops will join approximately 2,500 U.S. National Guard and Reserve troops already stationed there. There are currently no active forces operating along the nearly 2,000-mile border.
The troops are expected to be used to support Border Patrol agents, through logistics, transportation and barrier construction, according to US officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because details have not yet been released. The troops have performed similar duties in the past, when both Trump and former President Joe Biden sent active-duty troops to the border.
Troops are prohibited by law from carrying out law enforcement duties under the Posse Comitatus Act, but that may change. Trump issued an executive order that the next Secretary of Defense and the next head of Homeland Security must report within 90 days if they believe the 1807 law called the Insurrection Act should be activated. This would allow those forces to be used in civilian law enforcement on US soil.
The last time this law was enacted was in 1992 during riots in Los Angeles protesting the acquittal of four police officers accused of beating Rodney King.
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The widely anticipated deployment, which came in Trump’s first week in office, was an early step in his long-awaited plan to expand the use of the military along the border. In one of his first orders on Monday, Trump directed his defense secretary to come up with a plan to “close the border” and push back “mass illegal immigration.”
On Tuesday, as Trump fired the Coast Guard’s chief, Adm. Linda Fagan, the service announced it would send more ships, planes and personnel to “America’s Gulf” — a reference to the president’s directive to rename the Gulf of Mexico. .
“I will declare a national emergency at our southern border,” Trump said during his inauguration speech on Monday. All illegal entries will be stopped immediately, and we will begin the process of returning millions upon millions of criminal aliens to the places they came from.
Military personnel have been sent to the border almost continuously since the 1990s to help address the migration problem. Drug trafficking and transnational crime.
In executive orders signed Monday, Trump suggested that the military would assist the Department of Homeland Security with “detention locations, transportation (including aircraft), and other logistics.”
There are about 20,000 Border Patrol agents, and although the southern border is where most of them are, they are also responsible for protecting the northern border with Canada. Agents are usually tasked with searching for drug smugglers or people trying to enter the country undetected.
But recently, they have had to deal with migrants actively seeking Border Patrol in order to gain asylum in America, taxing the agency’s staff.
In his first term, Trump ordered active-duty troops to the border in response to a migrant caravan that was slowly making its way through Mexico toward the United States in 2018. More than 7,000 active-duty troops have been sent to Texas, Arizona and California, including the Army. Police, attack helicopter battalions, communications units, medical units, various headquarters, combat engineers, planners, and public affairs units.
At the time, the Pentagon was adamant that active duty forces would not enforce the law. So they spent a lot of their time transporting Border Patrol agents to and along the border, helping them set up additional vehicle barriers and fencing along the border, assisting with communications and providing some security to border agent camps.
The Army also provided Border Patrol agents with medical care, pre-packaged meals and temporary housing.
It is also not yet clear whether the Trump administration will order the military to use the bases to house detained immigrants.
The bases had previously been used for this purpose, and after Kabul fell in 2021 to the Taliban, they were used to host thousands of Afghan evacuees. Utilities struggled to support the flow.
In 2018, then-Defense Secretary 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 ultimately not needed and Goodfellow was determined not to have the infrastructure. . necessary to support the boom.
In March 2021, the Biden administration greenlighted the use of property at Fort Bliss, Texas, to create a holding facility to provide beds for up to 10,000 unaccompanied migrant children as border crossings from Mexico increase.
A 2022 inspector general report found that the facility, run by the Department of Homeland Security, was quickly overrun, with too few case managers for the thousands of children who arrived, and exposure to extreme weather, dust and unsanitary conditions.
— Associated Press writers Aamer Madhani and Rebecca Santana contributed to this report.
