April 3, 2018

Trump Calls for Sending Military to the Mexican Border

It’s not clear what the soldiers would actually do.

Evan Vucci/AP

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

Thwarted so far in his effort to fully fund a border wall, President Donald Trump announced on Tuesday that he would send the military to help guard the border with Mexico until there is a wall and increased security. “That’s a big step,” he said at a meeting with leaders of Baltic nations. “We really haven’t done that before, or certainly not very much before.”

At a press conference later on Tuesday afternoon, Trump said he would soon meet with Defense Secretary James Mattis about the plan. 

There is no guarantee Trump will follow through with the pledge, and it is not clear what kind of military presence he has in mind. The impetus for Trump’s outburst is a “caravan” of Central Americans traveling through Mexico, some of whom hope to claim asylum in the United States. (Others plan to stay in Mexico.) Deploying the military to the border would not be an effective way to deter asylum-seekers, since they could still follow through with their plan to go to official US border crossings to apply for protections from persecution. 

The caravan, which is an annual event organized by the migrant assistance group Pueblos Sin Fronteras (People Without Borders) and designed to raise awareness about the dangers migrants face, became a fixation for Trump after Fox News covered it on Sunday. Over the course of a three-day tirade on Twitter, Trump has accused Mexico of “doing very little, if not NOTHING” to stop the caravan and claimed that “our country is being stolen.” Mexico’s interior department has said that it has deported about 400 members of the caravan to their countries of origin. Most of the caravan members are from Honduras. 

Mexico’s immigration authority told BuzzFeed that it plans to disband the caravan by Wednesday. Alex Mensing, one of the organizers of the caravan, disputed that characterization. “Don’t be fooled, the government isn’t ‘disbanding’ it, it’s conceding its participants’ right to apply for asylum without traveling in the shadows,” he told BuzzFeed. Some of the caravan members plan to continue to head towards the US border. Most of the caravan members were in southern Mexico as of Tuesday morning, according to the Washington Post.

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.

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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