Sending thousands of active-duty troops to the Mexican border makes no sense, according to a former spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security, who said “this is not a needed deployment.”
“It doesn’t on a couple of levels,” retired Marine Col. David Lapan said on CNN Wednesday night, when asked if the mission to send as many as 15,000 active-duty troops to the border makes sense militarily. “One, this issue about very dangerous people, again, no evidence that that’s the case. Certainly many women and children involved. Are there males involved? Certainly. But if you’re making the case that some of these people may be dangerous, well, one, the Customs and Border Protection folks that work the border every day are used to dealing with people who are potentially dangerous.”
He added that “The law doesn’t allow for active-duty military forces to even interact with these migrants. So what kind of security are active-duty forces providing from these potentially so-called dangerous people?”
Lapan, who was a spokesman for the Marine Corps and the Pentagon when he was in uniform, served as then-Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly’s spokesman for nine months last year. After Trump announced he was sending active-duty troops to the border to defend the U.S. against a caravan of migrants walking north through Texas, Lapan issued a viral tweet calling the mission into question.
“A military strained by 17 years of war and sequestration doesn’t need this. Service members who have repeatedly spent long periods of time away from home don’t need this,” Lapan tweeted Wednesday. “And the US doesn’t need its military to ‘defend’ against a group of unarmed migrants, inc. many women & kids.”
A military strained by 17 years of war and sequestration doesn’t need this. Service members who have repeatedly spent long periods of time away from home don’t need this. And the US doesn’t need its military to “defend” against a group of unarmed migrants, inc. many women & kids. https://t.co/nKVkjLDDGx
— David Lapan (@DaveLapanDC) October 31, 2018
Lapan mentioned some of those strains during his CNN appearance.
“We’ve asked a lot of our service members, men and women and their families over the last 17 years. This is not a needed deployment where we need to pull them away from their homes, their families and their regular jobs and their training to send them down to something that’s not really a national security threat.”
Lapan said he believes Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, who told a reporter Wednesday that “we don’t do stunts,” is doing his best to carry out a lawful order.
“So, you know, my belief is that Secretary Mattis is looking at this as a lawful order from the commander in chief,” he said. “As the secretary of defense, he and his department are going to carry out that order to the best of their abilities. I guess the point I would make is can the U.S. military undertake this mission and do it successfully? Yes. Should they do it? I would say no.”
