Pentagon rejected request for troops to act as emergency law enforcement at border
CNN
When Trump administration officials first asked the Pentagon to send troops to the southern border, they wanted the personnel to perform emergency law enforcement functions, according to defense officials who spoke with CNN.
The Pentagon said no. According to the two defense officials familiar with the request, the Department of Homeland Security asked that the Pentagon provide a reserve force that could be called upon to provide “crowd and traffic control” and safeguard Customs and Border Protection personnel at the border to counter a group of Central American migrants walking to the U.S. border to request asylum.
The Pentagon rejected the request on Oct. 26, according to one of the officials, even as it signed off on providing DHS with air and logistics support, medical personnel and engineers.
The request was turned down because the Department of Defense felt that active duty troops do not have the authority to conduct that type of mission unless they are granted additional authorities by the president.
Active duty U.S. troops are barred from domestic law enforcement unless there is an emergency, but President Donald Trump has repeatedly raised the prospect of having troops enforce the border as he campaigns hard on the dangers of immigration in the final days before the midterm elections.
At a White House speech on Thursday, the president suggested that troops should fire on migrants if they throw rocks, saying that rocks should be considered rifles and comparing the group of about 3,000 men, women and children to an “invasion.”
On Friday, Mr. Trump tried to walk back those comments, telling reporters that “if our soldiers,” or Border Patrol or Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers “are going to be hit in the face with rocks, we’re going to arrest those people. That doesn’t mean shoot them. But we’re going to arrest those people quickly and for a long time.”
More than 8,000 active duty troops could be deployed troops to the southwest border, more than are serving in some of the world’s most contentious combat zones, but they are there solely to support Homeland Security officials as they prepare for the migrants’ arrival.
The troops will join over 2,000 National Guardsmen who are already at the border, meaning upward of 10,000 American forces will be mobilized to stop Central American migrants that are still some hundreds of miles away from the border and weeks away from arriving in the U.S.
Senior military officers have defended the deployment on national security grounds, but the mission — dubbed Operation Faithful Patriot — has been met with scathing criticism from many former military officials.
Retired Gen. Martin Dempsey, who served as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 2011 to 2015, tweeted Friday that “our men and women in uniform are better trained, better equipped, and better led so they meet any threat with confidence. A wasteful deployment of overstretched soldiers and Marines would be made much worse if they use force disproportional to the threat they face. They won’t.”