Foreign PolicyBoth Sides Are Overselling Trump’s Troop Deployment to the BorderThe active-duty troops will mostly be putting up razor wire and moving border police.
By Lara Seligman | October 30, 2018, 2:36 PM
President Donald Trump is deploying an additional 5,200 active-duty troops to the southern border of the United States in what he has tried to portray as an unprecedented effort to stem an “invasion†by a caravan of Central American migrants.
The deployment, dubbed Operation Faithful Patriot, is aimed at hardening security at the Mexican border and will bring the number of U.S. troops there to over 7,000—more than triple the number of U.S. forces in Syria as of last December.
That sounds like a massive number, and critics are already out slamming what they see as the militarization of the border just days before the U.S. midterm elections on Nov. 6. On the other side of the aisle, proponents of the move are touting “unprecedented†support for border security from the Defense Department.
But the actual facts of the deployment do not live up to the hype from either side. The move—coming right before crucial midterms while the caravan is more than a month away from reaching the U.S. border on foot—is arguably a political ploy. But it is far from unprecedented: Both Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama deployed similar numbers of troops to the border during their times in office, though not during elections.
More important, once they arrive, the troops’ mission will be relatively benign. ...
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