Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
U.S. troops to patrol border, Trump vows
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump said Tuesday that he planned to order the military to guard parts of the southern border until he can build a wall and tighten immigration restrictions, proposing an escalation of his efforts to crack down on people entering the country illegally.
Trump, who has been stewing publicly for days about what he characterizes as lax immigration laws and the potential for an influx of Central Americans to stream into the United States, said he was consulting with Defense Secretary James Mattis about resorting to military deployments.
“We have very bad laws for our border, and we are going to be doing some things — I’ve been speaking with Gen. Mattis — we’re going to be doing things militarily,” Trump said at the White House, seated beside the defense secretary at a meeting with visiting leaders of Baltic nations. “Until we can have a wall and proper security, we’re going to be guarding our border with the military. That’s a big step. We really haven’t done that before, or certainly not very much before.”
It was not immediately clear what Trump meant by the remarks, or what the rationale would be for deploying
U.S. troops to patrol or even seal the border at a time when the numbers of people being apprehended crossing illegally are down to their lowest level since 1971.
The White House counsel’s office has been working on the idea for several weeks, according to a senior official who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal plans.
The active-duty military is generally barred by law from carrying out domestic law enforcement functions, such as apprehending people at the border. But previous presidents have deployed National Guard troops to act
in support roles on the border with Mexico — former President Barack Obama sent 1,200 in 2010 to beef up efforts to curb drug smuggling and illegal immigration, and former President George W. Bush dispatched 6,000 in 2006 to assist the border patrol with nonlaw-enforcement duties while additional border agents were hired and trained.
Governors of border states have taken similar measures when faced with large inflows. In 2014, then-Texas Gov. Rick Perry said he would dispatch as many as 1,000 National Guard troops to the southern border as the country faced an influx of children and families from Central America. Perry is now Trump’s energy secretary.
Trump has spoken before about opening a military operation to police the border, only to have his aides walk back the remarks after a backlash from members of his administration and officials in Mexico.
In February 2017, he called his immigration crackdown “a military operation,” prompting Rex Tillerson, then the secretary of state, and John Kelly, then the homeland security secretary, who were visiting Mexico at the time, to push back vigorously.
The two told their Mexican counterparts and reporters that the U.S. president did not, in fact, plan to use the military to hunt down and deport undocumented immigrants. The White House later insisted that Trump had meant the word “military”
only as an adjective.
On Tuesday, the president appeared convinced that U.S. troops were needed.
“We are preparing for the military to secure our border between Mexico and the United States,” he said during a news conference with the Baltic leaders. “I think it’s something we have to do.”
Trump met later in the day with top administration officials, including Mattis, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen and Attorney General Jeff Sessions, to discuss the administration’s strategy to address what White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders described as “the growing influx of illegal immigration, drugs and violent gang members from Central America.”
In addition to mobilizing the National Guard, Trump and senior officials “agreed on the need to pressure Congress to urgently pass legislation to close legal loopholes exploited by criminal trafficking, narco-terrorist and smuggling organizations,” Sanders said.
Trump’s comments Tuesday came after he kicked off his third consecutive day of tweeting about the United States’ “weak” border laws and called on Congress to act on legislation to toughen immigration laws.
Trump has been fixed on the issue since he signed a spending bill last month that includes far less money for the wall than he’d hoped for.
The $1.3 trillion package included $1.6 billion for border wall spending — a fraction of the $25 billion Trump made a last-minute push to secure. And much of that money can be used only to repair existing segments, not to build new sections.
The push also comes as Trump has complained with increasing urgency about a large group of people from Honduras that has been traveling
through Mexico.
The caravan has been a popular topic on Fox News — the news network favored by the president — and his aides have argued that weak immigration policies are luring the people from Central America to the United States.
Separately, the Department of Homeland Security is pushing for the end of the “catch and release” practice, which allows undocumented immigrants who have been apprehended to be released while they await their hearings.
Trump reiterated his complaints about the practice Tuesday, explaining that the current legal system for handling refugees who entered the country illegally was “ridiculous.”
“We have to change our policies, fast,” he said.
A group called Pueblo Sin Fronteras organized the caravan that has prompted the president’s complaints. The group consists of about 1,200 people — including infants, the elderly and people facing violence in their homelands.
Late Monday, Mexican immigration officials started to negotiate with the caravan’s organizers. And Mexican authorities have agreed to provide humanitarian visas to the travelers so that they can stay in Mexico legally, a representative from Pueblo Sin Fronteras said.
On Tuesday, Trump claimed credit for having persuaded Mexican officials to break up the caravan.
Information for this article was contributed by Julie Hirschfeld Davis of The New York Times; by Seung Min Kim of The Washington Post; by Jill Colvin, Lolita C. Baldor, Elliot Spagat, Mark Sherman, Catherine Lucey, Darlene Superville, Kevin Freking, Nomaan Merchant and Mark Stevenson of The Associated Press; and by Jennifer Epstein, Tony Capaccio and Justin Sink of Bloomberg News.