Despite his claim on Tuesday that he is taking an almost unprecedented step, Donald Trump is not the first commander in chief to deploy troops to the US-Mexico border.
Barack Obama sent 1,200 members of the National Guard to the frontier in 2010, following on from George W Bush’s decision four years earlier to boost the military presence there.
“It’s an act of aggression quite frankly if you station the military at your perimeter what does that say about your relationship with the neighboring country,” Andrea Guerrero, the executive director of the rights group, Alliance San Diego, told Al Jazeera.
“The military’s presence on the border will escalate the tension between the two countries and our fear both here and in Mexico that will lead to tragedy”, she said.
Under President George W. Bush, a border deployment of the National Guard known as Operation Jump Start started in 2006 and lasted two years. The operation sent more than 6,000 troops to California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas to repair secondary border fence, construct nearly 1,000 metal barriers and fly border protection agents by helicopter to intercept immigrants trying to enter illegally.
Late in the day, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, said Mr. Trump had met with Jim Mattis, the secretary of defense, and members of the national security team to discuss his administration’s strategy for dealing with “the growing influx of illegal immigration, drugs and violent gang members from Central America,” a problem on which she said the president had initially been briefed last week.
It wasn’t immediately clear exactly how the proposal would work or what kind of troops Trump wanted to deploy. But the White House later said Trump wanted to mobilize the National Guard.
The operation used the National Guard to assist Border Patrol with non-law enforcement duties while additional border agents were hired and trained. The number declined during the second year to about 3,000.
Over the two years, about 29,000 National Guard soldiers took part in the missions, as forces rotated in and out.
Trump spent much of the Easter weekend at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, where he hosted conservative commentators including the Fox News presenter Sean Hannity. Staffers with Trump included his policy adviser Stephen Miller, a chief architect of anti-immigration policies.
On Monday, White House officials said they were crafting a legislative package aimed at closing immigration “loopholes”
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