The House Armed Services Committee is under new management, and its old chairman is taking issue with statements by his successor over the military’s actions along the U.S.-Mexico border.
At the panel’s first hearing of the year, its ranking Republican member, Rep. Mac Thornberry of Texas, challenged a statement by its new chairman, Rep. Adam Smith, D-Wash., arguing there was no precedent for military to be sent to the U.S.-Mexico border.
Smith had said President Trump’s deployments of National Guard and active-duty troops to enhance security at the border ahead of the arrival of Central American caravans was “deeply troubling.”
“In previous years, when the military has supported the Department of Homeland Security along the southern border, National Guard personnel were deployed,” Smith said. “Moreover, the deployments to the border seem to conflict with the [Defense] department’s stated efforts to rebuild readiness.”
Smith said deployments were only justified “where they make sense.” He asked, “Unauthorized entries at the southern border are at historic lows. So, what is the emergency?”
Thornberry cited what he called ample precedent for sending American troops to the U.S.-Mexico border, going back five administrations.
Thornberry, who chaired the House Armed Services Committee from January 2015 to January 2019, pointed to former President Bill Clinton’s approval of troop deployments in 1997 in order to build and improve physical barriers on the southern border. He further noted former President Barack Obama’s 2012 deployment of military personnel to install sensor equipment. Obama also approved up to 1,200 guardsmen annually from 2010 to 2016 to help with Customs and Border Protection’s Operation Phalanx.
“Number one, what the administration has done is in line with — is consistent with the sorts of things that we have asked the military to do for a long, long time,” Thornberry said.
“My second takeaway is that under administrations of both parties and Congresses of both parties, we obviously aren’t providing for adequate resources for border security [sic] because we keep having to use the military to back up the Border Patrol when it ought to be their job to do it,” he continued.
Border Patrol arrested 364,000 people in fiscal 2012 under Obama, less than the 397,000 in 2018.
Under Secretary of Defense for Policy John Rood later told the committee the Pentagon has a “long history of supporting border security” operations, dating back to the early 1990s.
Rood added that Obama sent the military in to provide temporary housing to Health and Human Services for 16,000 unaccompanied children who arrived at the border from 2012 to 2017.
From 2006 through 2008, former President George W. Bush approved as many as 6,000 guardsmen at one time being deployed to the border to help with aviation, engineering, medical, entry identification, vehicle maintenance, and other tasks.
