U.S. starts to withdraw troops from Trump border mission
WASHINGTON — The U.S. this week will begin withdrawing many of the active-duty troops sent to the border with Mexico by President Donald Trump just before the midterm election in response to a caravan of Central American migrants, U.S. officials said Monday.
About 2,200 of the active-duty troops will be pulled out before the holidays, the officials said, shrinking an unusual domestic deployment that was viewed by critics as a political stunt and a waste of military resources.
That will leave about 3,000 active-duty troops in Texas, Arizona and California, mainly comprised of military police and helicopter transport crews who are assisting border patrol agents. There also will still be about 2,300 members of the National Guard who were sent to the border region as part of a separate deployment that started in April.
The active-duty troops, numbering about 5,200 as of Monday, were initially scheduled to stay until Dec. 15. Late last month, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis extended the mission to the end of January at the request of the Department of Homeland Security. It’s unclear if it will be extended again.
Meanwhile, the number of people expressing fear of returning to their home countries when stopped at the U.S. border with Mexico has spiked, according to figures released Monday by U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
U.S. border authorities fielded 92,959 “credible fear” claims — the initial step toward asylum — in the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, up 67 percent from 55,584 the previous year. The “credible fear” claims accounted for 18 percent of all people arrested or stopped at the Mexican border in the latest period, up from 13 percent a year earlier.
CBP publicly released the numbers for the first time as more migrants, many of them families and children from Mexico and Central America, seek asylum or other forms of humanitarian protection to gain entry to the U.S.