WaPo: The troop deployment to the border is a total farce [View all]

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U.S. troops enter a compound where the military is erecting an encampment near the U.S.-Mexico border crossing at Donna, Tex., on Nov. 6. (Andrew Cullen/AFP/Getty Images)

PRESIDENT TRUMP’S order deploying thousands of active-duty troops to the U.S.-Mexico border, to halt what he characterized as an imminent “invasion” by so-called caravans of Central American migrants, had its use as pre-electoral political theater. But it is not a laughing matter.

Taxpayers are already on the hook for a bill likely to exceed $200 million over the next several weeks to support at least 7,000 soldiers whose mission, insofar as the Pentagon has described it, is unlikely to involve detaining or deporting any of the Central Americans who make their way to the frontier. Rather, the U.S. service members are expected to provide support — helping spot incoming migrants; transporting Border Patrol agents by helicopter; stringing concertina wire on existing border barriers; providing emergency medical care if needed.

That’s a big if. Military planners estimate that just a fifth of the roughly 7,000 mainly Honduran migrants heading northward by foot through Mexico are likely to reach the border. And Pentagon officials have made clear that those who do make it that far are unlikely to pose a threat to national security. Journalists traveling with the migrants report that more than half of them are women and children, not the hardened criminals and Middle Easterners — “the worst scum in the world” was the president’s baseless characterization — that Mr. Trump conjured to inflame his Republican base before the midterm elections.

Presidents Barack Obama, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton all sent National Guard troops to the border but in generally much smaller numbers and on better-defined grounds; they, too, were criticized for shows of force whose security value was more symbolic than real. Mr. Trump’s choice to use active-duty troops, and in numbers wildly disproportionate to any conceivable threat, is posturing masquerading as policy.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-troop-deployment-to-the-border-is-a-total-farce/2018/11/08/2144dd2a-e2de-11e8-b759-3d88a5ce9e19_story.html?utm_term=.dfca99fa807b