It Looks Like Trump Is Actually Sending Troops to the Border

National Guardsmen are being deployed to fight an imaginary crisis.

Evan Vucci/AP

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

The Trump administration is making good on the president’s pledge to send troops to the Mexican border. On Wednesday afternoon, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said the administration will work with governors to deploy National Guardsmen to the border.

The announcement is the culmination of Trump’s most recent obsession with the border, which began on Sunday after Fox News reported on a caravan of roughly 1,000 migrants traveling through Mexico. On Tuesday, Trump pledged to deploy the military to the border following three days of misleading and inaccurate tweets about immigration that began on Easter Sunday.

It is still not clear how many soldiers will be deployed or when they might arrive at the border. Nor is it clear what they will do. There are about 19 Border Patrol agents for every member of the caravan, according to the libertarian Cato Institute. A press release from the Department of Homeland Security stated that the “deployment is designed to support ongoing efforts to mitigate the crisis on our border.”

But it’s hard to argue that there is currently a crisis at the border. As Mother Jones wrote on Tuesday:

In the 2017 fiscal year, 303,916 people were apprehended along the US-Mexico border—the lowest level in nearly five decades and far below the 1.6 million apprehensions in 2000.* The number of people each Border Patrol agent arrests per year has dramatically declined as unauthorized border crossings have become less frequent.

In 2010, the Obama administration sent National Guardsmen to the US-Mexico border in response to concerns about drug-related violence, but Defense Department rules largely prevent the military from making arrests or seizing drugs along the border. Nick Miroff, a reporter at the Washington Post, wrote on Twitter that the guardsmen had little to do: “When I spent time with these soldiers watching the fence outside Nogales in 2011 they were hopelessly bored & desperate to leave.” Any soldiers Trump dispatches to the border are likely to encounter similar boredom.

Correction: An earlier version of this article misstated the date of the previous record-low number of people apprehended at the border.

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with The Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with The Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate