The Trump administration is reconfiguring and slightly scaling back the deployment of U.S. troops and personnel at the border in response to the shifting position of migrants trying to cross into the U.S., according to several Homeland Security and Defense officials.
Supplementary DOD and DHS forces have declined about 10 and 20 percent, respectively, in the last week. Remaining support is being moved to areas where caravans have settled in across the border from western Arizona and west from there toward San Diego.
“We are moving hundreds of additional CBP personnel into place to ensure our ability to safely address multiple potential contingencies, at and between the Southern California ports of entry,” a CBP spokesperson wrote in an email to the Washington Examiner Tuesday.
The first caravan group that left northern Central America in October did not travel the shortest route from southern Mexico to the U.S., which is 1,100 miles from the Guatemala-Mexico border to South Texas, near McAllen and Brownsville. Instead, they traveled up into Mexico City then went west to Tijuana, a total of about 2,500 miles.
U.S. Border Patrol is comprised of nearly 20,000 agents based at the Canadian and Mexican borders. In November, it pulled 870 agents from other parts of the country to help at areas of concern along the southern border it believed needed reinforcing ahead of the caravan’s arrival last month.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the patrol’s parent agency, sent 560 officers as reinforcements to the front lines, which were already stretched thin from illegal immigration levels that have skyrocketed from 16,000 apprehensions per month in April 2017 to more than 50,000 in October.
Those 1,430 combined CBP forces sent to Southern California and Arizona have dropped, according to figures provided Tuesday evening.
Of the 870 Border Patrol agents originally deployed, 460 remain in the field. However, CBP sent an additional 90 personnel on top of the 560 already at the border.
The Pentagon has also pulled back approximately 500 active-duty troops — nearly 10 percent of the 5,900 total that had been reported deployed last week.
As of Tuesday, 5,400 troops are stationed at the border, including 1,600 in Texas, 600 at the operation’s Texas headquarters, 1,400 in Arizona, and 1,800 in California, according to a spokesperson for U.S. Army North’s Joint Forces Land Component Command.
About 300 of the California troops were recently moved from Texas and Arizona to California because 6,000 members of the caravan have temporarily settled in Tijuana, just over the border from the Golden State.
Defense Secretary Jim Mattis on Tuesday approved extending the deployment of active-duty troops from Dec. 15 through the end of January.
The total number of people migrating as part of multiple caravans from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras has fluctuated in recent weeks as more than 3,200 dropped off to apply for asylum in Mexico instead of going onto the U.S.
Following President Trump’s order to bar the group from illegally entering the country, the Pentagon in October approved a DHS request to deploy additional troops to the southern border.
