The United States has long guaranteed the right to seek asylum to individuals who arrive at our southern border and ask for protection.
Donald Trump wanted to send 250,000 troops to mitigate the southern border in spring 2020 – during the onset of the pandemic, but Homeland Security Secretary Mark Esper was vehemently against the plan.
Esper believed, according to the unnamed sources, that bringing such a large number of troops to the border would compromise military readiness around the world.
In the midst of the raging pandemic, which was still new at the time, Miller urged DHS to develop a plan to send troops to seal the 2,000-mile border the U.S. shares with Mexico.
According to the officials, around the same time that officials considered the huge deployment to the U.S. side of the border with Mexico, Trump also pressed his top aides to send forces into Mexico itself to hunt drug cartels, much like U.S. commandos have tracked and killed terrorists in Afghanistan or Pakistan.
Federal courts have also rejected the legal basis for the use of Title 42 to expel individuals who have entered the United States.
Title 42 gives authority to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention during a health emergency to turn back illegal immigrants who cross into the U.S. without proper documentation of where they migrated from.
The current administration has continued using Title 42 during the pandemic, which progressive Democrats have criticized President Biden for.
Since Biden took office, migrants have been surging to the southern border – viewing his campaign promises on immigration as an open borders policy.
Trump himself made claims during that time that ‘tremendous infectious disease is pouring across the border’ and that troops were needed.
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Rather than a vast deployment of the military to the border, the Trump administration used an obscure public health rule — which remains in effect to this day — to deny asylum and effectively shut down entry into the United States from Mexico during the pandemic.
The ideas under discussion that spring underscore the Trump administration’s view of the armed forces as a tool of the presidency that could be wielded on behalf of Trump’s domestic political agenda in an election year and it further reveals the breach between Trump and his top military officials, who worked behind the scenes to prevent what they viewed as the president’s dangerous instincts.
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