Defense Department documents obtained by Newsweek show a troop surge at the southwest border, a request made by the White House amid President Donald Trump's renewed push to stem the flow of undocumented immigrants.
President Donald Trump has ordered thousands of additional American troops to the southwest border over the next two months, according to a document drafted last week by Defense Department officials and obtained by Newsweek.
A Pentagon spokesperson told Newsweek by phone Tuesday morning that U.S. military planners are anticipating sending a"brigade minus" or about 3,000 additional U.S. forces to join units already at the border, but they had not received a new request for assistance from Homeland Security to identify how many additional troops would be needed.
Roughly 2,800 active duty forces currently support the border mission, U.S. Army North told Newsweek via email on Tuesday. Approximately 1,200 of those forces work on the Mobile Surveillance Camera mission, with about 1,000 service members dedicated to fortifying ports of entry in Texas and New Mexico. The other 200 personnel serve as part of a crisis response force, with the remainder being assigned to headquarters and logistics support.
A U.S. military source said they were not aware of a new request for assistance from either DHS or U.S. Customs and Border Protection, but said the demand for more military forces came from the White House. The additional forces would be tasked with helping the Defense Department carry out its mission to assist U.S. Border Patrol officials “with planning, intelligence analysis, detection and monitoring and other support in order to enhance security along the international border,” according to the deployment orders.
The president expanded the authorities of the Defense Department at the border, including, permitting the use of lethal force, according to a White House memo obtained by Newsweek last year. Last week, Marine Commandant General Robert Neller said Marines deployed to the southwest border did not negatively impact service readiness when testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee during a hearing for next year’s defense budget.
On Friday, Democratic Senator and presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren asked Neller if any military training exercises had been canceled or if units missed scheduled training, due to budgetary issues. Neller said he did not know of any exercises that had been canceled. The timeline for the new deployment is in line with the Pentagon’s announcement in January that it would be extending its border mission through the end of September, dragging the domestic deployment out to nearly a year.
Yet, despite the Trump administration’s repeated warnings of a security crisis at the southern border, the head of U.S. Northern Command, U.S. Air Force General Terrence O'Shaughnessy, told lawmakers in late February that while “a secure border does reduce threats to the homeland,” the situation at the border “is not a military threat.”
In this photo taken on April 5, 2019, Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen walks alongside President Donald Trump as he tours the border wall between the United States and Mexico in Calexico, California. SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images
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