Trump Is Sending More Troops to the Border for Some Pre-Election and Coronavirus Fearmongering
March 10th 2020
U.S. and Kuwaiti troops unite to close the gate between Kuwait and Iraq after the last military convoys passed through, Dec. 18, 2011, signaling the end of Operation New Dawn. U.S. Army photo by Cpl. Jordan Johnson (United States Army)
By Gage Ortiz
The Trump administration is yet again deploying a number of U.S. troops to the U.S. southern border, sending 160 service members to areas of California and Texas as the legal fight over the administration’s inhumane policy forcing asylum-seekers to wait in Mexico escalates in the courts, BuzzFeed News reports. “Officials also said they were sending soldiers there due to increasing coronavirus concerns,” even though, as of this week, there have been more confirmed cases in Canada than in Mexico. More troops at the border mixed with some “Mexicans are bringing disease” fearmongering? Must be an election year.
Following a tumultuous few days during which a federal appeals court temporarily blocked the Remain in Mexico policy, then suspended the block as the Trump administration appealed it in an emergency petition to the Supreme Court, officials have allegedly been “worried large groups of immigrants would try to force their way into the US,” as BuzzFeed News reported. That claim, however, has been disputed by journalists covering this Trump administration-created humanitarian crisis:
Thirty asylum-seeking families—yup, sounds like some “chaos” and a totally justifiable reason to deploy a number of service members who, BuzzFeed News notes, “will be made up of military police, engineers, and personnel providing aviation support. They will not be enforcing immigration laws, officials said.” So who knows what they’ll be doing? Troops previously sent to the southern border by the impeached president to "support" border officials helped string a few sections of makeshift border fence using concertina wire, so there’s that.
What is clear is that the administration desperately wants to keep Remain in Mexico in place, and is rushing to the conservative justices of the Supreme Court for assistance. They may offer just that, even though lower courts and asylum officers themselves have criticized the inhumane policy for returning asylum-seekers to danger, in violation of law and decency. But it can’t be lost that it’s also happening as we’re two months into the year in which we’re fighting like hell to kick Trump out of office, so of course he’s entering the “Let’s send some troops to the border and throw in some anti-immigrant fearmongering while we’re at it” stage. It’s all he knows how to do.
Posted with permission