In the past four months, the Pentagon has sent thousands of active-duty combat troops and armored Stryker combat vehicles to the southwestern border to confront what President Trump declared on his first day in office was an “invasion” of migrants, drug cartels and smugglers.
That’s not all. The military has also dispatched U-2 spy planes, surveillance drones, helicopters and even two Navy warships to surveil the borders and coasts round the clock.
The buildup of forces underscores how Mr. Trump is breaking with his predecessors’ practice of mostly limiting deployments along the U.S.-Mexico border to small numbers of active-duty soldiers and reservists. About 2,500 active-duty troops were on the border at the end of the Biden administration. Now there are about 8,600.
In a recent visit with troops in Arizona, New Mexico and Texas, the border was fairly calm. Crossings, which decreased sharply in the waning months of the Biden administration, have plummeted even further since the Trump administration declared its goal to obtain “100 percent” operational control of the boundary with Mexico. In April, about 8,000 people were arrested after crossing the border illegally, down from about 128,000 people a year earlier, according to U.S. government statistics.
Even so, there is no end in sight for the military mission on the border, which the Pentagon says has cost $525 million so far.
The deployments continue to grow in size, scope and sophistication even as the debate over the benefits and drawbacks rages on, and the military expands its territorial authorities to help interdict migrants.
These initial steps have provided evidence to both sides of the debate over the utility of sending frontline combat forces to the border: They appear to be deterring cartels, making life somewhat harder for human smugglers and giving infantry troops, or at least Stryker crews, a chance to hone some skills. But the costs in dollars and to long-term combat readiness are still unclear.
Gen. Gregory M. Guillot, the head of the military’s Northern Command, recently told Congress that the border mission would probably be “measured in years, not months.” He added that troops would need to stay longer to thwart cyclical increases in migration.
The Pentagon has created two narrow strips of land along the 2,000-mile U.S. border with Mexico — one in New Mexico and another in Texas — effectively turning them into parts of nearby U.S. military bases.
Migrants entering the strips, which are about 200 miles and 63 miles long, are considered trespassing on military land and can be temporarily detained by U.S. troops until Border Patrol agents arrive.
During a visit to the border on April 25, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth held up signs in English and Spanish warning migrants against entering the areas.
A federal judge in New Mexico has dismissed charges against nearly 100 migrants arrested after entering the zone in the state, saying that the federal government had failed to show that the migrants knew they were unlawfully entering a restricted military area.
But “as a practical matter, I would be surprised if many people are actually detained by the military in the narrow albeit long military base,” said retired Air Force Maj. Gen. Charles J. Dunlap Jr., who was a deputy judge advocate general in the military. “Rather, I expect that the overwhelming majority of the military will be involved in supporting civilian law enforcement, not detaining border crossers.”
So far, the troops have been supporting law enforcement agencies, fanning out on foot patrols, in helicopters and in combat vehicles to serve as a deterrent and to give the authorities far more eyes and ears on the ground.
For now, top Trump aides have ruled out invoking the Insurrection Act, a more than 200-year-old law that would allow the use of the armed forces for law enforcement duty. Mr. Trump confirmed this month that he had pressed Mexico’s president to let U.S. troops into the country to help fight the drug cartels, an idea she summarily rejected.
Some members of Congress have questioned whether this is the best use of active-duty troops who would otherwise be training for deployments to Eastern Europe, the Middle East or the Indo-Pacific. Lawmakers and independent analysts have voiced concerns that the border missions will distract from training, drain resources and undermine readiness.
A Stryker battalion stationed in the El Paso area was scheduled for a rotation at the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, Calif., and then a deployment to South Korea. Both of those assignments have been pushed off for now.
“It is difficult to explain the border missions as anything but a distraction from readiness,” Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island, the top Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, said in remarks on the Senate floor on May 8.
Mr. Reed said that one Marine battalion had been stringing miles of barbed wire across the California mountains. Navy aircrews are flying P-8 Poseidons — the most advanced submarine-hunting planes in the world — over the desert. The two Navy destroyers are loitering off the West Coast and in the Gulf of Mexico, looking for migrant boats in the water.
But several commanders and some troops stationed along the border said in interviews that serving in one of Mr. Trump’s highest-priority missions gave them purpose. They are using many of their skills — route planning, mission rehearsals, patrols, surveillance flights — in the real world against criminal smuggling gangs and Mexican drug cartels, instead of just practicing at their home bases or in exercises, they said.
Col. Hugh Jones, the commander of the Stryker brigade deployed along the border, said military readiness levels, as measured by Army standards such as equipment maintenance, were at 94 percent in April, up from 78 percent in December for his 2,000-soldier unit of the Fourth Infantry Division based at Fort Carson, Colo.
Commanders say they must be creative to find training areas and ways to carve out time to keep their soldiers’ lethal skills sharp, from basic marksmanship to firing heavier weapons.
Re-enlistments among younger soldiers in the Stryker units — who never had the opportunity to serve combat tours in Afghanistan and Iraq like their more senior commanding officers — have soared in recent months, commanders say.
“This is their mission for their generation, and they’re embracing it,” said Maj. Gen. Scott M. Naumann, the head of the Army’s 10th Mountain Division, who moved his headquarters staff to Fort Huachuca, Ariz., in February to oversee what the military calls Joint Task Force-Southern Border.
The increased military patrols, working closely with Customs and Border Protection, have pushed Mexican cartels and smugglers into more remote mountainous areas to evade detection, driving up the costs of doing business, said General Naumann, who also consults with his Mexican military counterparts.
U.S. intelligence officials say that human traffickers are now charging migrants about $20,000 per person to be smuggled into the country, up from $7,000 a year ago.
With the flow of migrants vastly diminished, military officials say they are also focusing on arguably a more difficult job: helping domestic law enforcement agencies curb the flow of illicit drugs and other contraband into the United States, even though most such drugs are smuggled through legal ports of entry.
The centerpiece of the military’s ground support is more than 100 Stryker combat vehicles. The Stryker is a 25-ton, eight-wheeled vehicle that can carry 11 soldiers and weapons at speeds of more than 60 miles an hour. With its giant rubber tires instead of noisy tracks, it is fast and relatively quiet.
The vehicles, which were widely used in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, have an array of sensors that can pinpoint a target and share that information through satellite links with intelligence centers, essential in areas like Big Bend National Park in Texas, where cell coverage is poor or nonexistent.
On the border, commanders say a Stryker is particularly useful when positioned on a strategic overlook where smugglers and cartel members can see it. The vehicle’s optical sights can spot individuals or groups of individuals up to about six miles away.
The drab green combat vehicles and the troops operating them initially raised suspicions in some remote communities. Residents in Presidio, Texas, feared that the soldiers would come into schools searching for undocumented migrant children.
Commanders sought to dispel those worries by having troops stay in local hotels to become part of the community, and they drove a Stryker to an elementary school so children could climb on it.
The military’s growing presence has drawn sharp reaction from criminal groups and drug cartels, commanders say. Rock throwing against troops stationed near the border has increased, instigated by criminal groups, commanders said.
In an incident near El Paso, Border Patrol agents were forced to deploy tear gas to disperse a crowd taunting U.S. soldiers and threatening to kill them. American troops are armed for their self-protection but rely on Border Patrol for crowd control.
Several suspicious unarmed surveillance drones monitoring U.S. troops have posed a potentially more serious hazard, General Naumann said. Based on electronic intercepts, commanders believe the cartels are spying on soldiers to figure out how to bypass them. Commanders have the authority to shoot down any drone deemed to be hostile to U.S. troops, a step they have not yet taken.
“This is a real-world mission with real consequences,” said Lt. Col. Chad Campbell, the commander of the Stryker battalion stationed outside El Paso.
Indeed, two Marines were killed and another was critically injured in a vehicle accident near Santa Teresa, N.M., a few miles from El Paso.
Pentagon leaders have previously been lukewarm at best about using troops to seal the border, calling such efforts the beginning of a slippery slope that could pull the military into domestic political issues.
In Mr. Trump’s first term, both of his defense secretaries wanted to avoid deploying troops to the border and, if they could not, to minimize their presence there.
Mr. Trump’s first defense secretary, Jim Mattis, tried to protect troops from any perception that they might be engaging in partisan political activity. In April 2018, Mr. Mattis responded to the president’s initial demand for a military deployment by sending 2,100 unarmed National Guard troops. That was not much different from past deployments of National Guard soldiers to the border.
Later that year, in the run-up to the midterm vote in 2018, Mr. Trump ordered that troops be deployed to the border to help deal with an approaching migrant caravan. The president asked for 10,000 troops, then 15,000. Mr. Mattis responded by sending 6,000 and told them to stick to support roles.
The military announced that the border mission would be called Operation Faithful Patriot. But on Election Day, Mr. Mattis told officials to drop the name, and the Pentagon sent out a terse news release saying that the operation from then would be known simply as border support. The term “faithful patriot,” officials said, had political overtones.
Mr. Mattis’s successor as defense secretary, Mark T. Esper, knocked back a White House proposal in the spring of 2020 to send 250,000 troops to the border.
There are plenty of examples in which the military has been used for domestic purposes. With the exception of what experts call the “feel good” stuff like natural disaster relief, the military has “come away from those instances saying, ‘Yeah, we don’t want to do that again,’” said Peter Feaver, a political science professor at Duke University and an expert on civil-military relations.
“The military prefers to orient itself towards foreign adversaries,” Mr. Feaver said. “It prefers to have other branches of the government, to include other security sectors like police, border police, homeland security, who train for and are optimized for domestic missions — have them do it.”
Eric Schmitt is a national security correspondent for The Times, focusing on U.S. military affairs and counterterrorism issues overseas, topics he has reported on for more than three decades.
Helene Cooper is a Pentagon correspondent for The Times. She was previously an editor, diplomatic correspondent and White House correspondent.
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