The approaching horde of illegal aliens who think they’ll cross the U.S.-Mexican border and declare squatter’s rights with phony asylum claims has prompted the Pentagon to plan another big deployment.
Mission: Protect the country from the invasion that is heading this way.
Troop deployment: 2,000.
Migrants marching toward the border: 12,000.
Likely percentage of phony asylum claims: 90 percent.
The Troops
Acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan divulged the new deployment to reporters Tuesday.
Shanahan, the Associated Press reported, said the Department of Homeland Security “has asked us to support them in additional concertina wire and then expanded surveillance capability, and we’ve responded with, you know, here how many people it would take and this is the timing and mix of the people to support that.”
About 2,400 troops are at the border, meaning the level of active-duty military personnel at the border would approach 5,000. That’s less than the 5,900 that were at the border just before the midterm elections.
Even as Shanahan told reporters that U.S. troops were actually defending U.S. territory, as opposed to defending the interests of the Globalist Deep State in far-flung lands, Vice Admiral Mike Gilday, the director of operations for the Joint Staff, testified before the House Armed Services Committee.
Gilday told the panel that the deployment had not affected military readiness overall, AP reported.
“We believe that our military’s presence and support has served to increase the effectiveness” of operations at the border, Gilday testified, the New York Times reported. “We’re not trying just to have a photo op down there.”
Gilday admitted, AP reported, that the Pentagon has had to correct improper deployments. “We have tried really hard not to waste people’s time down to the border,” he told the panel. “There have been occasions when we haven’t gotten it right with respect to numbers. And maybe we had excess capacity, but we have brought those people back when we realized that we have made a mistake.”
In written testimony, Gilday and John Rood, Undersecretary of Defense for Defense Policy, disclosed that the new troops, approved on January 11, “will operate mobile surveillance cameras in Arizona, California, New Mexico, and Texas in all nine Border Patrol Sectors, and emplace concertina wire on existing barriers at areas designated by CBP along the southern border between POEs in Arizona and California.”
The surveillance will continue through the end of the fiscal year, September 30. Customs and Border Patrol wants another 150 miles of concertina on the border no later than March 31.
The troops will not, the two wrote, enforce the law, which is prohibited by the Posse Comitatus Act.
Rood and Gilday also offered a short history of the Defense Department’s work along the border, beginning with President George W. Bush and continuing with President Barack Hussein Obama. For instance, the two wrote, “from 2012 to 2017, DoD provided shelter for nearly 16,000 [unaccompanied minors], who received care, security, transportation, and medical services” from the department of Health and Human Services.
Also at the border are 2,270 National Guardsmen, Air Force Magazine reported. A Guard spokesman told the magazine that their work includes inspecting cargo, paralegal work, installing telecommunications equipment, and operating heavy equipment. As well, the troops monitor drug smugglers and human trafficking and gather intelligence to help fight criminal gangs.
The cost of active duty personnel at the border through the end of January will be $132 million, Gilday told the committee, AP reported. The cost of Guard deployment will be about $308 million for fiscal 2019 and was $103 million last year. The Times and Air Force Magazine offered different figures.
Headed This Way
The troops are there for one reason. To help support border agents hold back the column of migrants rolling north at will.
Rood told the committee that the Pentagon is trying to keep track of three caravans with more than 12,000 illegal aliens. The Mexican government is helping move them toward the border by issuing year-long humanitarian visas.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration’s plan to send 20 migrants a day back to Mexico to await adjudication of their asylum claims is, apparently, still delayed.
The administration’s fact sheet on its Migrant Protection Plan says that 90 percent of asylum claims from Central Americans are bogus.
Photo: Stadtratte/iStock/Getty Images Plus
