Speaking during a news conference on April 3, President Trump said that he plans to send U.S. troops to guard the southern border with Mexico until his proposed wall is built. “Until we can have a wall and proper security, we are going to be guarding our border with the military,” the president said with Defense Secretary James Mattis sitting alongside him. “That’s a big step. We really haven’t done that before, or certainly not very much before.”
The president was speaking during a meeting with the heads of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia.
“We are preparing for the military to secure our border between Mexico and the United States,” Trump said later in the day on April 3 during a press conference. “We have a meeting on it in a little while with General Mattis and everybody. And I think that it’s something we have to do.”
VOA News noted that two of Trump’s predecessors — George W. Bush and Barack Obama — sent National Guard units to provide intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance support for Border Patrol agents.
During the news conference, the president also spoke of a “caravan” of more than 1,000 migrants from Central America that has been making a 1,200-mile journey from the Mexico-Guatemala border to the United States. VOA reported that Trump has mentioned the caravan several times on Twitter in recent days, stating that it must be stopped.
Those in the caravan “thought they were going to just walk right through Mexico and right through the border” into the United States, explained Trump, who praised a quick response from Mexico, which he said was acting to ensure it is “all being broken up.” Such a caravan is organized almost every year by the group Pueblo Sin Fronteras (Peoples Without Borders) and is designed to protest U.S. immigration policy.
The Hill also reported that over the past three days, Trump has displayed obvious frustration concerning the lack of progress in building a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, as well as what he describes as “weak laws” against illegal immigration.
The White House said in a statement released on the evening of April 3 that Trump and his team discussed “the mobilization of the National Guard” as part of a new border strategy, but provided no further details.
An April 3 Washington Post report quoted a tweet that Trump sent at 7:00 a.m. that day, reading: “The big Caravan of People from Honduras, now coming across Mexico and heading to our ‘Weak Law’ Border, had better be stopped before it gets there.” “Cash cow NAFTA is in play, as is foreign aid to Honduras and the countries that allow this to happen. Congress MUST ACT NOW!”
The report continued by noting that the Mexican government took steps late (April 2) to break up the caravan, registering the migrants and saying that some would be asked to leave the country while others would receive humanitarian assistance. Mexico’s Interior Ministry said that “under no circumstances does the government of Mexico promote irregular migration.”
The Post reported that Honduras received about $127.5 million in aid from the United States in fiscal 2016, according to data from the U.S. Agency for International Development. As for Congress acting now, the report noted that Congress is in a two-week recess.
In an article for The New American posted on April 2, this magazine’s foreign correspondent, Alex Newman, provided details about the forces behind the caravan of migrants traveling through Mexico toward the United States that has prompted Trump to send National Guardsmen to secure the border. It is called Pueblos Sin Fronteras, Spanish for Peoples Without Borders. However, noted Newman, despite the Spanish name, much of the caravan’s activity and the leadership appears to be based in the United States.
Newman wrote about the caravan:
As is typical in political demonstrations organized by Marxists and their useful idiots, the caravan marchers have reportedly been chanting political slogans such as “el pueblo, unido, jamas sera vencido.” In English, that means “the people, united, will never be defeated.” The migrants in the caravan have also been chanting slogans demonizing the elected president of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernández, who ran as a conservative Christian in defiance of the so-called Pink Tide of subversion, tyranny, and communism spreading its tentacles across the region from Havana, Caracas, Moscow, and Beijing. The marchers have also been shouting globalist slogans, reportedly chanting “we aren’t immigrants, we’re international workers.”
Newman observed that the caravan is not a haphazard assembly of migrants who randomly happened to meet up with other migrants along the way, but, “It is clear that the operation is highly organized. And the organizers clearly know what they are doing.”
News of the Pueblos Sin Fronteras caravan was first reported by the left-wing website Buzzfeed.
According to the Buzzfeed report, the migrants were organized into groups of 10 or 15 people, each with a leader. Five of those small groups were then organized as a “sector.” There are also “committees” to handle food, security, logistics, and more. The People Without Borders outfit then helps them arrange transportation and more, while apparently radicalizing the migrants with far-left rhetoric and ideology — perhaps a coordinated effort to create more future Democrat voters if and when the U.S. government grants another round of amnesty.
Some reports about Trump’s plan to use the military to secure our border against the caravan of approaching aliens have observed that active-duty military personnel face strict limits on their ability to operate on U.S. soil and that an 1878 law bans federal troops from enforcing domestic laws. However, Article IV, Section 4 of the Constitution states: “The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion.”
If the well-organized Pueblos Sin Fronteras caravan that has obvious intentions to cross our border and enter our country is not an invasion, then nothing is. Trump’s action is clearly constitutional.
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