President Donald Trump on Tuesday threatened to send military forces to secure the southern border on Tuesday as he continued to vent frustration over the lack of progress on his long-promised wall.
“We are going to be guarding our border with the military,” Trump said Tuesday during a White House lunch with Baltic leaders.
He called the measure a “big step.”
The U.S. Border Patrol is currently tasked with protecting the U.S.-Mexico border.
Trump has railed in recent days against “weak” immigration laws in the U.S. — declaring protections for young immigrants “dead,” accusing Democrats of allowing “open borders, drugs and crime,” and warning Mexico to halt the passage of “caravans” of immigrants.
Throughout the 2016 election, Trump campaigned on the promise of a “big, beautiful” wall that would be paid for by Mexico.
After taking office he said that Congress should approve the use of taxpayer funds to cover the $25 billion his administration said would be needed to start work on the project.
Trump has also privately floated the idea of funding the construction of border wall through the Pentagon, arguing it is a national security priority.
There are strict rules that prohibit such spending that’s not authorized by Congress.
“Until we can have a wall and proper security, we’re going to be guarding our border with the military,” Trump said Tuesday. “We really haven’t done that before, or certainly not very much before.”
The call for troops along the border does recall a project started by former President George W. Bush.
Bush’s so-called Operation Jump Start, which spanned between 2006 and 2008, differed from Trump’s proposal in that National Guard members were only called to support Border Patrol agents with administrative, observational and intelligence operations.
Due to the heated political nature of militarizing the border, Bush assured then-Mexican President Vicente Fox that the National Guard were not involved in any law enforcement activities.
Trump, who last year ended the Obama-era program that allowed immigrants brought to the country as children to work legally here, vowed to pull the U.S. out of NAFTA should Mexico not show greater force in stopping people from crossing the border.
He has also bristled at news coverage of Honduran migrants who have been marching through Mexico in recent days.
The “Stations of the Cross” migrant caravans have been held in southern Mexico for at least the last five years. Mexico started breaking up the group on Monday evening.
Despite Trump’s claims that the wall is necessary to prevent drugs and undocumented immigrants from entering the country, the Department of Homeland Security said in December that illegal crossings are at the lowest levels in nearly 50 years.
Illegal border crossing arrests were down 25 percent in 2017, compared with a year earlier.
“The Mexican border is very unprotected by our laws. We have horrible, horrible and very unsafe laws in the United States,” Trump said. “We are going to be able to do something about that hopefully soon.”
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