The Pentagon is sending about 3,000 extra active-duty troops to the U.S.-Mexico border as President Donald Trump seeks to clamp down on unlawful immigration and fulfill a central promise of his marketing campaign, U.S. officers stated Saturday.
His protection secretary, Pete Hegseth, has ordered parts of a Stryker brigade fight group and a normal help aviation battalion for the mission, the Pentagon introduced. The forces will arrive alongside the almost 2,000-mile border within the coming weeks.
The Protection Division’s assertion didn’t specify the dimensions of the deployment, nevertheless it was put at about 3,000 by the officers, who weren’t approved to debate the matter publicly and spoke on situation of anonymity.
The Strykers are medium-armored wheeled personnel carriers.
Already, about 9,200 U.S. troops in whole are on the southern border, together with 4,200 deployed below federal orders and about 5,000 Nationwide Guard troops below the management of governors.
The brand new troops will “reinforce and increase present border safety operations to seal the border and defend the territorial integrity of the USA,” the Pentagon stated.
Trump is set to increase the army’s function in his effort to close down the border and ship detained migrants again to their dwelling international locations.
Army personnel have been despatched to the border virtually repeatedly for the reason that Nineteen Nineties to assist tackle migration, drug trafficking and transnational crime.
The Washington Publish first reported on the brand new deployment.
Mexican troopers had been mobilized on Tuesday to the border with the USA to crack down on fentanyl trafficking.