On Tuesday, President Trump announced his plans to station the National Guard on the Southern border to stem the flow of dangerous narcotics from flowing into the US from Mexico.
The deployment is meant to be a stopgap measure, in place until the permanent solution of a border wall is finally built.
This announcement by the President came soon after his statement highlighting his plans to bring the troops back home from Syria. While some critics may call this an “extreme measure,” the US has frequently bolstered its border by deploying the military.
In fact, former President Barack Obama in 2010, deployed 1,200 troops of the National Guard to assist the Border Patrol in stopping the flow of harmful narcotics from Mexico. And in 2006, President George Bush deployed 6,000 national Guardsmen across the border to defend the nation.
In a briefing last week, senior White House officials had warned the President about the “growing influx of illegal immigration, drugs and violent gang members from Central America, and directed a vigorous administrative strategy to confront this threat and protect America’s national security,” which led to Trump’s plan of deploying the military to the border.
“Until we can have a wall and proper security, we are going to be guarding our border with the military,” said Trump, in a statement on Tuesday. “That’s a big step. We really haven’t done that before, or certainly not very much before.”
“The details really matter here,” said Stephen Vladeck, a School of Law professor at the University of Texas, in response to Trump’s statement. “The real question is going to be if the President is serious about this, what kind of legal arguments do we get out of the White House and the Pentagon for such a deployment.”
Geronimo Gutierrez, the Mexican ambassador in Washington, also reacted to Trump’s statement saying, “It’s certainly not something that the Mexican government welcomes.”
