Trump mulls 15,000 troops vs. caravan

RAGES AT DESPERATE FAMILIES HUNDREDS OF MILES FROM U.S.

Doubling down on his preelection anti-immigration push, President Trump on Wednesday claimed he may send 15,000 troops to the U.S. southern border to keep a slow-moving caravan of Central American migrants from entering the country.

The Pentagon announced earlier this week that it is sending roughly 5,200 troops to the border and, despite Trump's sustained threat, the caravan only comprises about 3,500 people, remains nearly 1,000 miles away from U.S. territory and is largely made up of families and children hoping to legally apply for asylum.

“As far as the caravan is concerned, our military is out. We have about 5,800. We'll go up to anywhere between 10,000 and 15,000 military personnel on top of Border Patrol, ICE and everybody else,” Trump told reporters at the White House before departing for a political rally in Florida.

“Nobody is coming in. We're not allowing people to come in.”

Trump has tried to make illegal immigration a hotbutton issue ahead of next week's congressional midterm elections, stoking fear about an imminent migrant “invasion,” making false claims about “criminals and unknown Middle Easterners” being “mixed in” with the caravan and vowing to militarize the border.

There are already some 2,000 National Guard members stationed at the border, ordered there by Trump earlier this year.

If Trump's pledge of 15,000 additional troops materializes, there will be three times as many U.S. soldiers on the country's southern border than are currently deployed to Iraq to fight ISIS and stabilize the war-torn nation.

There will also be nearly six U.S. soldiers for each migrant, all of whom are unarmed.

A Pentagon spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.