US Army says more soldiers may go to Mexico frontier

A senior US general overseeing more than 5,200 soldiers being sent to the border with Mexico said troop levels would rise further, but did not say by how much or estimate what the operation will cost.

Many questions remained unanswered after the Pentagon announced the openended operation, including the scope of the mission as well as the military’s assessment of any threat posed by arriving migrants.

President Donald Trump has hardened his stance on immigration before the November 6 midterms. He has drawn attention to a caravan of migrants trekking through Mexico towards the US as he seeks to fire up political support.

Republican legislators and other Trump supporters have applauded the army intervention. But critics say Mr Trump is politicising the military, deploying them as a stunt to drive Republican voters to the polls without any real national security threat.

Gen Terrence O’Shaughnessy, the head of US Northern Command, defended the operation at a briefing on Tuesday. He echoed the Trump administration’s views on the caravan and compared the border support mission with other domestic operations, like hurricane relief.

“I firmly believe that border security is national security,” Gen O’Shaughnessy said.

Pentagon officials said the Department of Defence will need to find a way to pay for the operation, suggesting money could be taken from other national security programmes.

Gen O’Shaughnessy said that more than 1,000 troops had gone to Texas, where they will carry out tasks such as building barriers, erecting tents and flying government personnel to locations along the border.

He said the troops now scheduled to go to Texas, Arizona and California were only the start of a larger deployment and that they would go to New Mexico as well.

“What I can confirm is there will be additional force over and above the 5,239. The magnitude of that difference, I don’t have the answer for now,” he said.

The projected numbers are about the same size as the US military contingent in Iraq.

Mr Trump railed against illegal immigration to win the 2016 presidential election and has seized on the caravan at campaign rallies in the run-up to next week’s vote.

Mr Trump has characterised the migrants as an invasion and falsely stated they harbour terrorists and are financed in part by Democrats.

Gen O’Shaughnessy declined to comment on intelligence about the caravan when asked whether there were terrorists among the migrants.

He said the caravan was different to those seen by the United States in the past and that that they were better organised.

“We’ve seen violence coming out of the caravan,” he said.

Mexico’s government said on Tuesday that it had deported two Honduran men for whom there were arrest warrants back home, one for homicide, the other for a drug-related offence. The two men, aged 21 and 47, crossed into Mexico with the migrant caravan in the state of Chiapas.

Kevin McAleenan, the US Commissioner of Customs and Border Protection, estimated on Monday that the travelling mass of people comprised about 3,500 migrants from Central America.