Trump plans to place troops along the border

President Donald Trump said Tuesday that he plans to secure the nation’s southern border by deploying troops until his promised border wall is completed.

Trump said he is “preparing for the military to secure our border” until the wall is completed during an event with Defense Secretary James Mattis.

“I told Mexico, and I respect what they did, I said, look, your laws are very powerful, your laws are very strong. We have very bad laws for our border and we are going to be doing some things, I spoke with Mattis, we’re going to do some things militarily. Until we can have a wall and proper security, we’re going to be guarding our border with the military. That’s a big step,” he said during a luncheon with leaders of the Baltic states.

He added: “We cannot have people flowing into our country illegally, disappearing, and by the way never showing up for court.”

Befuddled U.S. reporters asked the president to clarify during a seperate press conference later in the day– and he doubled down.

“The Mexican border is very unprotected by our laws,” he said. “We have horrible, horrible and very unsafe laws in the United States, and we’re going to be able to do something about that, hopefully soon. We are preparing for the military to secure our border between Mexico and the United States. We have a meeting on it in a little while with General Mattis and everybody. And I think that it’s something we have to do.”

And despite what is sure to be an ensuing leftist freak-out over the president’s plan, there actually is precedent for sending armed troops to guard the U.S. border against illegal immigration.

As POLITICO noted:

From 2006 to 2008, on orders from President George W. Bush, the National Guard was deployed to aid Customs and Border Protection, with 6,000 members of the Guard at the peak. Those deployed were armed but did not have authority to perform law enforcement functions like pursuing or detaining suspects. In 2010, President Barack Obama sent 1,200 members of the Guard, who were largely limited to surveillance of the border fence.

During the Obama era deployments, the Army reported that soldiers were conducting “day and night reconnaissance missions using the Long Range Advanced Scout Surveillance System to detect, recognize, identify and geo-locate possible incursions, which they would then report to Border Patrol agents. Avenger Soldiers, using the Forward Looking Infrared system, and Soldiers monitoring Sentinel radar, also augmented border air incursion detection efforts.”

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