The Military people are NOT happy about their Commander-in-Chief pushing for a situation that could could violent at the border….
The border ‘caravan ‘ is made up of families with children…
Trump has tried to turn the situation into a violent conflict….
And drag the military into a political place it does NOT want to be in….
Defense Sec Mattis isn’t in a hurry to let things get sideways down there….
Oh, and as the Pentagon has tried to get those support troops back home for the end of the year holidays?
Trump’s people , who will be home?…
Want the support troops to rough it out longer….
The Defense Department on Tuesday provided its first official estimate of the cost of the deployment—$72 million to date—a number that Mattis said he is “confident” will rise. And he suggested the possibility of new missions and added troops.
“Some of those troops certainly will be [home by Dec. 15] because we can anticipate based on the number of miles of [concertina] wire…we know the rate we can do it over certain types of terrain,” Mattis told reporters at the Pentagon. But, he said, “Some troops may not be, or some new troops may be assigned to new missions.
“This is a dynamic situation.”
Then, late Tuesday night, the White House sent a memo to the Pentagon broadening the military’s authority to interact directly with migrants. Up until now, troops operating on the border have been unarmed and limited to performing auxiliary support functions, like laying concertina wire and transporting supplies. Their official mission is supporting U.S. Customs and Border Protection, or CBP, and officials have been clear that they will not engage directly with migrants. Broadly, U.S. troops operating on the border are restricted by the 19th-century Posse Comitatus Act, which requires an act of Congress if the president is to wield the U.S. military for domestic law enforcement purposes.
But the new authorization, signed by Chief of Staff John Kelly, allows the military to “perform those military protective activities that the Secretary of Defense determines are reasonably necessary” to protect border agents, including “a show or use of force (including lethal force, where necessary), crowd control, temporary detention and cursory search,” Military Timesreported.
How the troops will wield force on the border has been a point of fierce controversy and uncertainty. Trump said he had directed troops to “consider it a rifle” if migrants throw rocks at them. Some former senior military leaders characterized the remark as an unlawful order, arguing that the president had effectively ordered the military to open fire on unarmed civilians—a war crime. (Other legal scholars of the use of force have said that those assessments are overblown, because rocks can constitute a potential deadly weapon and the rules for use of force already envision a rubric for the appropriate level of response).
Mattis said the memo directs him to determine what authorities troops may need to “back up” CBP, and said that he will act only in response to a request from the Department of Homeland Security, or DHS—the CBP’s parent agency. He downplayed the suggestion that the new authorization will lead to heavily armed troops on the border or long-term military detention, which could run afoul of the Posse Comitatus Act.
“We’ll look at, what does DHS need—I now have that authority,” Mattis said. But, he said, “There has been no call for any lethal force from DHS. There is no armed element going in. I will determine it based on what DHS asked for and a mission analysis.”….
Update…
Donald keeps inviting legal trouble in his efforts reinvent immigration policy….
President Donald Trump made a Thanksgiving Day threat to close the U.S. border with Mexico for an undisclosed period of time if his administration determines that its southern ally has lost “control” on its side….