Every branch of the military is a part of the United States’ border with Mexico, despite the decline in attempted illegal crossings, to 7,600 deployments of troops.
Additionally, President Donald Trump authorized funding for an additional 3, 000 Border Patrol agents and provided bonuses totaling $10,000.
A new command center at a far-off Army intelligence training facility, which is located along southern Arizona’s Huachuca Mountains, serves as the guide for the military mission at the border. Battalion commanders and staff there use digital maps to map military locations and movements along the nearly 3,200-kilometer (2, 000-mile) border, making a community hall into a bustling war room.
The military had previously been tasked with border enforcement, but the military had only recently intervened.
However, large swaths of the border were designated militarised zones in April, allowing US troops to apprehend trespassers and grant permission for additional criminal offenses that could lead to prison sentences.
The two-star general leading the mission claims that troops are being let go of maintenance and warehouse duties so they can work with US Border Patrol agents in high-traffic areas for illegal crossings quickly and on remote, unprotected terrain.
“We don’t have a union for labor,” he said. There is no cap on how many shifts and hours we can work, according to Army Major-General Scott Naumann.
“We can leave soldiers out for days at a time whenever we need to to get over the problem,” he said. Now that the cartels are shifting, we can fly people into extremely remote areas.
The Trump administration broadly uses the military to boost its immigration operations, from assisting Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in Florida to protecting federal buildings in Los Angeles from protests.
Additionally, it is planned to place detained people on Texas, Indiana, and New Jersey military bases.
Trump is aiming to fulfill his campaign promise to stop illegal immigration to the border, according to Dan Maurer, a law professor at Ohio Northern University and a retired US Army judge advocate.
It all fits into a very muscular, robust, intimidating, and aggressive response to this, according to Maurer, to demonstrate to his supporters that he was serious about a campaign promise to fix immigration.
Source: Aljazeera
Leave a Reply