Yet another Trump failure
“When you send a soldier on a dubious mission, with no military value, over Thanksgiving, it doesn’t help morale at all,” Rep. Anthony Brown (D-MD), an Iraq War veteran, told the Times.
Troops at U.S.-Mexican border to start coming home
The 5,800 troops who were rushed to the Southwest border amid President Donald Trump’s pre-election warnings about a refugee caravan will start coming home as early as this week
Democrats and Republicans have criticized the deployment as a ploy by the president to use active-duty military forces as a prop to try to stem Republican losses in this month’s midterm elections.
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U.S.-Mexico border
"Our end date right now is 15 December, and I've got no indications from anybody that we'll go beyond that," said Army Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Buchanan. | Guillermo Arias/AFP/Getty Images
DEFENSE
Troops at U.S.-Mexican border to start coming home
By WESLEY MORGAN 11/19/2018 04:15 PM EST Updated 11/19/2018 05:36 PM EST
The 5,800 troops who were rushed to the Southwest border amid President Donald Trump’s pre-election warnings about a refugee caravan will start coming home as early as this week — just as some of those migrants are beginning to arrive.
Democrats and Republicans have criticized the deployment as a ploy by the president to use active-duty military forces as a prop to try to stem Republican losses in this month’s midterm elections.
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The general overseeing the deployment told POLITICO on Monday that the first troops will start heading home in the coming days as some are already unneeded, having completed the missions they were sent for. The returning service members include engineering and logistics units whose jobs included placing concertina wire and other barriers to limit access to ports of entry at the U.S.-Mexican border.
The decision to begin pulling back comes just weeks after Trump ordered the highly unusual deployment.
In previous cases where the military deployed to beef up the border, the forces consisted of part-time National Guard troops under the command of state governors who backed up U.S. Customs and Border Protection and other law enforcement agencies.
But the newly deployed troops, most of them unarmed and from support units, come from the active-duty military, a concession the Pentagon made after Trump insisted that the deployment include "not just the National Guard."
Buchanan confirmed previous reports that the military had rejected a request from the Department of Homeland Security for an armed force to back up Border Patrol agents in the event of a violent confrontation.
"That is a law enforcement task, and the secretary of defense does not have the authority to approve that inside the homeland," Buchanan said.
The closure of one entry point earlier Monday along the California border near Tijuana, Mexico, was only partial and did not require more drastic measures, Buchanan said.
"About half of the lanes were closed this morning but that’s it," he reported. "No complete closures."
Other ports might be closed fully in the future, he said, but he was not anticipating any need to take more drastic measures.
"If CBP have reliable information that one of their ports is about to get rushed with a mob, or something like that that could put their agents at risk, they could ask us to completely close the port," Buchanan said. "You understand the importance of commerce at these ports. Nobody in CBP wants to close a port unless they’re actually driven to do so."
The troop deployment should start trailing off as engineer and other logistics troops wind down their mission of building base camps and fortifying ports of entry for the Border Patrol.