Thousands of additional active duty US troops are being ordered to the southern US border with Mexico, just two days after President Donald Trump mandated that the US military step up its presence there, according to officials familiar with the matter.
There are already about 2200 active duty forces at the border as part of Joint Task Force-North, US Northern Command’s border mission based out of El Paso, Texas.
They help support US Customs and Border Protection’s work there, performing mostly logistical and bureaucratic tasks such as data entry, detection and monitoring, and vehicle maintenance.
It is not yet clear which specific units are being ordered to the border.
There is also a National Guard contingent at the border called Operation Lonestar, headed by the Texas National Guard. There are about 4500 National Guardsmen currently assigned to the mission, according to the Texas Military Department.
The additional active duty troops being sent to the border this week would be doing much of the same, the officials said, and were expected to feed into and augment Joint Task Force-North.
They will be helping to maintain operational readiness for Border Patrol, assisting in command-and-control centres, and providing more intelligence specialists to assess threats and migrant flows, according to sources familiar with the planning.
The troops are also expected to augment air assets and help with air operations.
Even more active duty troops are expected to be deployed to the border in the coming weeks and months, one of the officials said, with this first wave laying the groundwork for a larger military footprint.
It is not clear whether the troops will be armed. But none of the active duty troops are authorised to perform any kind of law enforcement role, like perform arrests or seize drugs, or engage with migrants other than to help transport them to and around different migrant facilities.
A law that dates back more than a century known as “posse comitatus” bars active-duty US troops from domestic law enforcement without authorisation. Other laws and regulations have further clarified that troops can’t participate in activities such as making arrests and conducting searches, according to a Congressional Research Service analysis.
President Trump did say in an executive order on Monday, however, that he will decide within 90 days whether to invoke the Insurrection Act at the US-Mexico border, which would allow him to use active duty troops domestically for law enforcement.
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Federal resources along the US southern border have been stretched thin for years amid an influx of migrants.
The number of migrants crossing the southern border has dropped recently—there are between 1100 to 1300 migrants illegally crossing the border daily, according to a Homeland Security official.
But by adding more Pentagon personnel, sources expect Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which has been assisting along the border, will be able to go back to the interior to focus on arrests of undocumented immigrants already inside the US.
