Trump moves to whipsaw the Troops ‘defending the border’ perception…..

President Trump on Wednesday said he might deploy up to 15,000 service members to the U.S. southern border to stop a “caravan” of migrants from entering the country.

“As far as the caravan is concerned, our military is out. We have about 5,000. We’ll go up to anywhere between 10 and 15,000 military personnel on top of Border Patrol, [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] and everybody else at the border,” the president told reporters on the South Lawn.

Trump vowed the U.S. would not allow people from the “very dangerous” caravan to cross the border, even though many say they plan to seek asylum at legal ports of entry, which is permitted under the law.

“Nobody is coming in. We’re not allowing people to come in,” he said.

Trump’s latest comments come just two days after he sent 5,200 active-duty personnel to the border to assist Border Patrol in responding to the shrinking caravan, which is still hundreds of miles away from the U.S.

Such a deployment could outstrip the number of U.S. service members in Afghanistan, who number 14,000…..

Defense Secretary James Mattis on Wednesday pushed back on criticisms that the deployment of more than 5,200 service members to the U.S.-Mexico border was a political stunt from the Trump administration before the midterm elections.

“We don’t do stunts in this department,” Mattis told reporters, according to a Pentagon pool report.

Mattis said the military support to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which oversees U.S. Customs and Border Protection, “is practical support based on the request from the commissioner of customs and border police.”

“We do this following storms, we do this in support of the Department of Homeland Security. This is a different aspect of it, but that’s what we are doing,” Mattis said after meeting with the South Korean defense minister at the Pentagon…

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