A misuse of the military
President Trump got the military parade he wanted after all. His deployment of 5,239 active-duty troops to the southern border — supposedly to counter a shrinking caravan of Central Americans desperate enough to walk the length of Mexico — is effectively a parade because it has no legitimate military purpose.
The force, which Trump has threatened to triple, is his latest and most reckless effort to draw undue attention to the migrants and stoke racist passions the week before the midterm elections. He might as well have ordered the armed forces to protect vulnerable Republican congressional seats from the electorate.
The caravan set out from Honduras nearly three weeks ago and eventually grew to 7,000 or more migrants. Since then, their number has dwindled by about half as they have traversed more than 600 miles through Guatemala and southern Mexico to the state of Oaxaca. Trump’s agitation, meanwhile, has only grown. He has made largely implausible threats to end aid to Honduras and other Central American countries, suspend the North American Free Trade Agreement, change U.S. immigration law and close the border.
The president has also promoted false claims that the so-called invasion is a conspiracy involving Democrats and is replete with criminals and terrorists — just the sort of fantasies that figured prominently in the social media posts of the man who massacred 11 worshipers at a Pittsburgh synagogue last week.
With the migrants still nearly 900 miles away from the closest border crossing, any contingent that reaches the United States is unlikely to arrive for weeks. But with only a few news cycles left before election day, Trump began Monday to deploy what looks to be the largest active-duty military force sent to the border since shortly after World War I. Most of the forces deployed there over the past century, including more than 2,000 troops sent in April, have been members of the National Guard.
While the administration claims the approaching migrants justify the armed response, they don’t. The caravan consists of vulnerable migrants, including many women and children, seeking safety in numbers as they flee violence and poverty. The utility of the deployment is even more questionable given legal limits on military activity within the United States.
If some part of the caravan makes it to the border, the migrants are not expected to challenge or evade authorities but to surrender to them and seek asylum under U.S. and international law. With many such groups having preceded the caravan, and more already on the way, this is certainly a legal, logistical and social problem. But it is not a military problem.