Doubling down on his pre-election anti-immigration push, President Donald Trump on Wednesday said he may send 15,000 troops to the U.S. southern border to keep a slow-moving caravan of Central Americans from entering the country.
The Pentagon announced earlier this week that it is sending roughly 5,200 troops to the border and, despite Trump's sustained fear-mongering, the caravan comprises roughly 3,500 people, remains nearly 1,000 miles away from U.S. territory and largely comprises families and children hoping to legally apply for asylum.
"As far as the caravan is concerned, our military is out. We have about 5,800. We'll go up to anywhere between 10,000 and 15,000 military personnel on top of Border Patrol, ICE and everybody else," Trump told reporters at the White House before departing for a political rally in Florida. "Nobody is coming in. We're not allowing people to come in."
Trump has tried to make illegal immigration a hot-button issue ahead of next week's congressional midterm elections, stoking fear about an imminent migrant "invasion," making false claims about "criminals and unknown Middle Easterners" being "mixed in" and vowing to militarize the border.
There are already 2,000 National Guard members stationed at the border, ordered there by Trump earlier this year.
If Trump's pledge of 15,000 additional troops materializes, there will be three times as many U.S. soldiers on the country's southern border than are currently deployed to Iraq to fight the Islamic State and stabilize the war-torn nation. There will also be nearly six U.S. soldiers for each migrant, all of whom are unarmed.
A Pentagon spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.
Trump's extremely unusual demand for military action on the border has raised eyebrows from experts who have noted that it will cost taxpayers a fortune.
Moreover, active-duty members of the armed forces are prohibited by law from detaining or searching undocumented immigrants. They are only allowed to advise and assist federal immigration authorities.
"A military strained by 17 years of war and sequestration doesn't need this," tweeted David Lapan, a retired Marine who served as a spokesman for Trump's Homeland Security Department until October 2017. "Service members who have repeatedly spent long periods of time away from home don't need this. And the U.S. doesn't need its military to 'defend' against a group of unarmed migrants, including many women and kids."
