Troops at U.S.-Mexican border to start coming home
The 5,800 troops who were rushed to the southwest border amid President Donald Trump’s pre-election warnings about a refugee caravan
will start coming home as early as this week — just as some of those migrants are beginning to arrive.
Democrats and Republicans have criticized the deployment as a ploy by the president to use active-duty military forces as a prop to try to stem Republican losses in this month’s midterm elections.
The general overseeing the deployment told POLITICO on Monday that the first troops will start heading home in the coming days as
some are already unneeded, having completed the missions for which they were sent. The returning service members include engineering and logistics units whose jobs included placing concertina wire and other barriers to limit access to ports of entry at the U.S.-Mexico border.
All the troops should be home by Christmas, as originally expected, Army Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Buchanan said in an interview Monday.
"Our end date right now is 15 December, and I've got no indications from anybody that we'll go beyond that," said Buchanan, who leads the land forces of U.S. Northern Command.
On Tuesday, Buchanan’s command appeared to backpedal on his statement after critics of the deployment called
the decision to wind it down so soon new evidence it was unnecessary in the first place.
The plan to begin pulling back came just weeks after Trump ordered the highly unusual deployment.
In previous cases in which the military deployed to beef up security at the border, the forces consisted of part-time National Guard troops under the command of state governors who backed up U.S. Customs and Border Protection and other law enforcement agencies.
But the newly deployed troops,
most of them unarmed and from support units, come from the active-duty military, a concession the Pentagon made after Trump insisted that the deployment include "not just the National Guard."
Buchanan confirmed previous reports that the
military had rejected a request from the Department of Homeland Security for an armed force to back up Border Patrol agents in the event of a violent confrontation.
"That is
a law enforcement task, and the secretary of Defense does not have the authority to approve that inside the homeland," Buchanan said.
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