President Donald Trump is sending 5,200 troops and a slew of military equipment to the southern border, doubling down on one of his favorite base-rallying issues with the midterm elections just days away.
The troops, who will be at the border by the end of the week, are being deployed to stop Central American migrants bound for the US, according to Pentagon and Homeland Security officials who spoke Monday.
The migrants, who are some 900 miles away from the border, are weeks away from arriving at the border where many reportedly plan to seek asylum.
"Our concept of operations is to flow in our military assets with a priority to build up southern Texas, and then Arizona, and then California," Gen. Terrence John O'Shaughnessy said Monday, adding that the soldiers normally assigned weapons will be carrying them at the border. "We'll reinforce along priority points of entry, so as to enhance" the ability of Customs and Border Protection officers to "harden and secure the border."
The Pentagon will also send medical units, command posts, military police units and strategic airlift capabilities, including four large transport aircraft for deploying CBP personnel and helicopters equipped with sensors to operate at night.
There is already enough concertina wire at the border to cover 22 miles, O'Shaughnessy said, with another 150 miles worth available. The general also told reporters that "everything we are doing is in line with and in adherence to Posse Comitatus," the federal statute that forbids the use of the military to enforce domestic law.
The troops will supplement extra CBP officers, Border Protection Commissioner Kevin McAleenan said. Speaking in Washington with O'Shaughnessy, the commissioner said that DHS has "at the ready 1,000 CBP officers, including 250 tactical enforcement officers and mobile response team professionals" with training in managing contingencies, including riot control.
"Our message to the organizers and participants in the caravan is simple," McAleenan said. "We will not allow a large group to enter to United States in an unsafe manner."
Neither McAleenan nor O'Shaughnessy addressed what the extra deployments will cost taxpayers.
Critics decried the move as a political stunt meant, in part, to distract from "a serious attempted political assassination and media bombing campaign, and religious and racially motivated shootings."
Neera Tanden, president of the Center for American Progress, Rabbi David Saperstein, a former ambassador at large for international religious freedom, and Henry Fernandez, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, said in a statement that "President Trump is manufacturing a crisis around the caravan for political gain -- to stoke fears and garner votes for the midterms."
The migrant group, they said in a statement, is hundreds of miles away from the US border, is "not threat to the country, it is shrinking in size, unarmed, and filled mostly with women and children. We have laws in place if the migrants reach the border."
Source: CNN
BDST: 1958 HRS, OCT 30, 2018
AP
