BORDER TROOPS COULD COST $200 MILLION,
WASHINGTON — The total price of President Donald Trump’s military deployment to the border, including the cost of National Guard forces that have been there since April, could climb well above US$200 million by the end of 2018 and grow significantly if the deployments continue into next year, according to Pentagon figures.
The deployment of as many as 15,000 troops to the U.S.-Mexico border — potentially equal in size to the U.S. troop presence in Afghanistan — occurs as the budgetary largesse the military has enjoyed since Trump took office looks set to come to an end.
Although the costs of the deployments will be a tiny slice of a $716-billion annual defence budget, they arrive as the administration is calling on the Pentagon to cut unnecessary expenditures.
Veterans and Democratic lawmakers have complained that Trump is wasting military dollars in a politically motivated stunt ahead of Tuesday’s midterm elections.
“Instead of working in a bipartisan manner to make comprehensive, common-sense and humane reforms to our immigration system, the president continues to turn to politically motivated fearmongering and uses (Department of Defense) resources and personnel as a means to drive his troubling anti-immigration agenda,” more than 100 House Democrats wrote in a letter to Defence Secretary Jim Mattis on Nov. 1.