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WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump directed the deployment of 1,500 additional active duty troops to help secure the southern border, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said on Wednesday, putting in motion plans Trump laid out in executive orders shortly after he took office to crack down on immigration.
Acting Defense Secretary Robert Salesses said the Pentagon will provide military aircraft to support Department of Homeland Security deportation flights for more than 5,000 detained migrants and the troops will assist in the construction of barriers.
The number of troops and their mission may soon change, Salesses said in a statement. “This is just the beginning,” he said.
Speaking to reporters outside the White House on Wednesday, Leavitt called the move a part of Trump’s goal to “direct the Department of Defense to make homeland security a core mission of the agency.”
“This is something President Trump campaigned on, the American people have been waiting for such a time as this – for our Department of Defense to actually take homeland security seriously,” she added. “This is a number one priority of the American people and the president has already delivered.”
It remains to be seen if they will end up doing law enforcement, which would put American troops in a dramatically different role for the first time in decades.
The active duty forces will join the roughly 2,500 U.S. National Guard and Reserve forces already there. There are currently no active duty troops working along the roughly 2,000-mile border.
Personnel started moving to the border earlier Wednesday, according to a military official briefing reporters on the condition of anonymity to provide additional details on the deployment. The troops will include 500 Marines from Camp Pendleton in California, and the remainder will be Army.
Troops have done similar duties in support of Border Patrol agents in the past, when both Trump and former President Joe Biden sent active duty troops to the border.
Troops are prohibited by law from doing law enforcement duties under the Posse Comitatus Act, but that may change. Trump has directed through executive order that the incoming secretary of defense and incoming homeland security chief report back within 90 days if they think an 1807 law called the Insurrection Act should be invoked. That would allow those troops to be used in civilian law enforcement on U.S. soil.
The widely expected deployment, coming in Trump’s first week in office, was an early step in his long-touted plan to expand the use of the military along the border. In one of his first orders on Monday, Trump directed the defense secretary to come up with a plan to “seal the borders” and repel “unlawful mass migration.”
The announcement of 1,500 troops being sent came as Trump signed another border-related executive order on Wednesday, this one directing the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Justice, and the Department of State to “take all necessary action to immediately repel, repatriate, and remove” people trying to illegally cross the southern border.
A White House fact sheet on the order points to a section of the Constitution that gives the federal government power to “protect each of [the States] against Invasion,” going on to assert that former President Joe Biden’s administration “failed to protect them from millions of illegal aliens entering the United States.”
Trump said during his inaugural address on Monday that “I will declare a national emergency at our southern border. All illegal entry will immediately be halted, and we will begin the process of returning millions and millions of criminal aliens back to the places in which they came.”
In his first term, Trump ordered active duty troops to the border in response to a caravan of migrants slowly making its way through Mexico toward the United States in 2018. More than 7,000 active duty troops were sent to Texas, Arizona and California, including military 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 do law enforcement. 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 for border agent camps.
Trump also signed a Presidential Memorandum on Wednesday that directs federal agencies to “untangle the American economy from Biden constraints” in a bid to lower prices for the public.
