Troops could remain at border into 2019

WASHINGTON — The Pentagon is considering keeping active-duty U.S. troops on the southwestern border into January, two Defense Department officials said Wednesday, potentially extending a deployment to confront a caravan of migrants from Central America.

The military’s border mission is currently slated to end Dec. 15, and no final decision has been made to extend it, said the two officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The roughly 5,900 U.S. troops on the border are spread between southwestern Texas and Southern California in a constellation of small bases where they have helped set up concertina wire and other security barriers.

But even as Pentagon officials consider extending the deployment, they are also looking at ways to bring home the troops before Christmas — underscoring how the mission remains loosely defined.

Defense Secretary Jim Mattis visited troops deployed to Texas the week before Thanksgiving. There, a soldier asked him if the troops would need to remove the hundreds of miles of concertina wire that they had strung up.

Mattis could not answer the question.

‘‘Right now, the mission is to put them in,’’ he said. ‘‘We’ll let you know.’’

Earlier this month, President Donald Trump called for up to 15,000 troops to guard the border against several approaching migrant caravans. The 5,900 soldiers the Pentagon has sent have carried a cost of at least $72 million.

Trump, meanwhile, said he is considering a backup plan if Congress rejects his demand for $5 billion for construction of his border wall. But he has expressed impatience.

“I am firm,” he said in an interview published Wednesday in Politico.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said the Trump administration hasn’t even spent the $1.6 billion Congress approved in the current budget for the wall.