Border Military - Army soldiers from Fort Riley, Kansas, line barbed wire near the port on the U.S.-Mexico border on Nov. 4, 2018, in Donna, Texas. John Moore/Getty Images
The US military mission on the Mexican border will no longer be called Operation Loyal Patriot, officials said.
Border Military
Formerly called Operation Loyal Patriot, it consists of approximately 5,200 troops, joining 2,000 troops already stationed along the US-Mexico border.
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Pentagon spokesman Lt. Gen. Jamie Davis said in a statement Wednesday that when the Defense Department released its name, the operation was still ongoing.
A U.S. Border Patrol agent detains an undocumented immigrant on Nov. 6, 2018, in McAllen, Texas. Border Patrol agents on the ground, assisted by a helicopter unit of U.S. Air and Naval Operations agents, arrested a group of migrants who had crossed the border illegally from Mexico. John Moore / Getty Images
Gen. Terence O'Shaughnessy, the commander of North American Forces and North American Air Defense Command, announced the decision at a news conference on October 29 and first called it "Operation Loyal Patriots."
Troops on the border are a mix of active duty, reserve and National Guard forces and support the thousands of border patrols already deployed in the region. Marines install concertina wire atop the main border wall of the harbor near Tijuana, Mexico, in San Ysidro, San Diego, California, Nov. 9, 2018.
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This commentary originally appeared on The Cipher Brief, an in-depth, expert-led digital news site. A membership to The Cipher Brief provides permanent access to select analyzes and columns from any computer or device.
President Trump's decision to send at least 5,200 active-duty troops to the southern border of the United States is drawing attention, generating plenty of headlines and sharp tweets from both sides. President Trump is not the first president to send troops to the border recently — President George W. Bush and President Obama also sent troops to the border, and their decisions at the time had political undertones. Part of the reason President Trump's decision differs from his predecessors is the size of the deployment, the use of active-duty troops other than the National Guard, questions about the level of danger the migrant caravans actually pose, and the timing of the deployment, just days before the midterm elections. It's coming in hot and hard.
After the Revolution, Americans preferred to draw a fine line between military missions and police functions. Congress passed the Posse Comitatus Act in 1878, prohibiting US troops from engaging in local law enforcement activities. In recent years, as concerns about illegal immigration and drug trafficking along the southern border have grown, the Department of Defense has sought to avoid militarizing the border, particularly after a US Marine was accidentally killed during an anti-narcotics mission in May 1997 Mr. and a young man named Ezequiel Hernandez Jr. who grazed goats by the river Rio Ge, killed.
When President Bush sent the National Guard to the Southwest border from 2006 to 2008 as part of Operation Jump Start, the reason for the deployment was to free up Customs and Border Protection (CBP) personnel so that CBP could focus on hiring and training new agents. , as CBP sought to double the number of officers to about 18,000. President Obama deployed the National Guard to the Southwest border in May 2010, two months after the killing of an Arizona rancher and as political tensions grew over illegal immigration and human trafficking. drugs. The National Guard troops were there to provide intelligence, surveillance, and counter-narcotics intelligence and were again provided ostensibly as a one-year bridge so CBP could recruit and train additional agents.
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In all three presidential administrations, the deployment resulted from a request for assistance from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to the Department of Defense (DoD). To request assistance from the Department of Defense, the Secretary of Homeland Security sends a formal request letter that requests specific military skills that DHS believes it needs for the mission. The Department of Defense assesses the demand and determines which specific units or military platforms are best suited to provide the requested capabilities and whether it can legally provide those capabilities. For this latest mission, CNN reported that the original DHS submission to the Department of Defense was a request for units that could provide "crowd and traffic control," but that the Department of Defense rejected that part of the request because the department was considered these functions to be law enforcement activities. The law. Part of determining which units can best provide the requested capabilities is determining whether those capabilities will come from the active or reserve component of the U.S. Army. In some cases, desired capabilities may remain only in the active sector, such as the specialized engineering skills provided by the Army Corps of Engineers. In other cases, the requested capabilities may also exist in the Federal Reserve or National Guard. Unlike active military personnel, National Guard personnel are authorized to perform law enforcement functions in the United States, often making them better at enforcing border security.
It is not entirely clear why the Department of Defense is relying on active duty Army instead of National Guard personnel for Operation Loyal Patriot. One possible reason is that not all of the claimed capabilities that DHS has requested are in Guard. The Department of Defense provides DHS with combat engineer battalions to build barrier walls, military planners to integrate command and control, and medium-altitude helicopters equipped with night vision capabilities to support surveillance, transport CBP agents, and medical evacuation. if necessary. The Department of Defense also provides strategic aviation, specialized medical units and logistics units. Some of these forces may remain only in the active part. Another reason the DoD may use active duty personnel is that they can often deploy more quickly than reserve component personnel. Congress requires the Department of Defense to provide National Guard and Reserve personnel with at least 180 days' notice of deployment to minimize deployment disruptions to their families and civilian employers. This requirement can be waived by the Secretary of Defense, but given the urgency President Trump has placed on this mission, the Secretary of Defense may have decided that active duty personnel could go to the border sooner.
News of border enforcement also raises questions about what the rules will be for military personnel to participate, especially after President Trump indicated that the military would be able to use deadly force against immigrants who throw rocks. Under fire, the president walked back that comment, but there is still concern about the military's role at the border. Last week, North American Command commander General T.J. O'Shaughnessy, who is in charge of the US military on the southern border, said CBP would deal with the migrants, but the military should be prepared for "incidental contact" with them and that soldiers and Marines would be there for training. this opportunity. General O'Shaughnessy emphasized that military personnel will be trained to CBP standards, reflecting a key lesson learned from the Hernandez incident, which demonstrated inadequate preparation and training for the mission. Secretary James Mattis, himself a Marine, surely wants to avoid the possibility of any "deals" going awry, both with immigrants at the border and civilian militia members who appear to be mobilizing on their own. makes it more complicated. complex landscape.
Regardless of questions about pitting active-duty troops against the National Guard or Posse Comitatus and the rules of engagement, a central question about Operation Loyal Patriot is whether such a military response is necessary to address the situation on the southern border. CBP already has several hundred trained agents at the border, with two dozen aerial surveillance and mobile response vehicles. As part of Operation Guard Support, more than 2,000 National Guard soldiers are already there. Although General O'Shaughnessy dismissed press reports that some 14,000 troops were going to the border, he made it clear that the Defense Department would send only 5,200 troops. What are all these soldiers facing on the southern border?
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In recent years, few of the migrants making the caravan journey have reached US ports of entry. A late October briefing by the North American military, the land component of US Northern Command, announced that four migrant convoys carrying a total of nearly 7,000 unarmed migrants, many of them women and children, had passed through Mexico. The U.S. military estimates that only 20 percent of those migrants — 1,400 people — are expected to reach the border. It is not clear why at least 5,200 active-duty military personnel are needed to handle this number of migrants in 45 days in addition to other assets already stationed there, but it is clear that it will cost the Department of Defense millions of dollars . while keeping soldiers and sailors away from training for their combat missions
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