The Pentagon will begin deploying as many as 1,500 active duty troops to help secure the southern border in the coming days, U.S. officials said Wednesday, putting in motion plans President Donald Trump laid out in executive orders shortly after he took office to crack down on immigration.
Acting Defense Secretary Robert Salesses was expected to sign the deployment orders on Wednesday, but it wasn't yet clear which troops or units will go, and the total could fluctuate. It remains to be seen if they will end up doing law enforcement, which would put American troops in a dramatically different role for the first time in decades.
The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because the announcement has not yet been made.
The active duty forces would join the roughly 2,500 U.S. National Guard and Reserve forces already there. There are currently no active duty troops working along the roughly 2,000-mile border.
The troops are expected to be used to support Border Patrol agents, with logistics, transportation and construction of barriers. They have done similar duties in the past, when both Trump and former President Joe Biden sent active duty troops to the border.
Troops are prohibited by law from doing law enforcement duties under the Posse Comitatus Act, but that may change. Trump has directed through executive order that the incoming secretary of defense and incoming homeland security chief report back within 90 days if they think an 1807 law called the Insurrection Act should be invoked. That would allow those troops to be used in civilian law enforcement on U.S. soil.
The last time the act was invoked was in 1992 during rioting in Los Angeles in protest of the acquittal of four police officers charged with beating Rodney King.
The widely expected deployment, coming in Trump’s first week in office, was an early step in his long-touted plan to expand the use of the military along the border. In one of his first orders on Monday, Trump directed the defense secretary to come up with a plan to “seal the borders” and repel “unlawful mass migration.”
On Tuesday, just as Trump fired the Coast Guard commandant, Adm. Linda Fagan, the service announced it was surging more cutter ships, aircraft and personnel to the “Gulf of America” — a nod to the president’s directive to rename the Gulf of Mexico.
Trump said during his inaugural address on Monday that “I will declare a national emergency at our southern border. All illegal entry will immediately be halted, and we will begin the process of returning millions and millions of criminal aliens back to the places in which they came.”
Military personnel have been sent to the border almost continuously since the 1990s to help address migration. drug trafficking and transnational crime.
In executive orders signed Monday, Trump suggested the military would help the Department of Homeland Security with “detention space, transportation (including aircraft), and other logistics services.”
There are about 20,000 Border Patrol agents, and while the southern border is where most are located, they’re also responsible for protecting the northern border with Canada. Usually agents are tasked with looking for drug smugglers or people trying to enter the country undetected.
More recently, however, they have had to deal with migrants actively seeking out Border Patrol in order to get refuge in America — taxing the agency’s staff.
In his first term, Trump ordered active duty troops to the border in response to a caravan of migrants slowly making its way through Mexico toward the United States in 2018. More than 7,000 active duty troops were sent to Texas, Arizona and California, including military police, an assault helicopter battalion, various communications, medical and headquarters units, combat engineers, planners and public affairs units.
At the time, the Pentagon was adamant that active duty troops would not do law enforcement. So they spent much of their time transporting Border Patrol agents to and along the border, helping them erect additional vehicle barriers and fencing along the border, assisting them with communications and providing some security for border agent camps.
The military also provided Border Patrol agents with medical care, pre-packaged meals and temporary housing.
It's also not yet clear if the Trump administration will order the military to use bases to house detained migrants.
Bases previously have been used for that purpose, and after the 2021 fall of Kabul to the Taliban, they were used to host thousands of Afghan evacuees. The facilities struggled to support the influx.
In 2018, then-Defense Secretary Jim Mattis ordered Goodfellow Air Force Base in San Angelo, Texas, to prepare to house as many as 20,000 unaccompanied migrant children, but the additional space ultimately wasn’t needed and Goodfellow was determined not to have the infrastructure necessary to support the surge.
In March 2021, the Biden administration greenlighted using property at Fort Bliss, Texas, for a detention facility to provide beds for up to 10,000 unaccompanied migrant children as border crossings increased from Mexico.
The facility, operated by DHS, was quickly overrun, with far too few case managers for the thousands of children that arrived, exposure to extreme weather and dust and unsanitary conditions, a 2022 inspector general report found.
Associated Press writer Rebecca Santana contributed to this report.
© Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
17 Comments
Login to comment
theFu
Isn't using the US military in this way illegal? The US military isn't trained for this. It will end badly.
State governors can send their national guard troops to do things like this, but not the main US military.
US military is trained to break things and kill people. That's their mission. Trying to use them for other needs has always failed.
lincolnman
Bad, bad idea...
After spending 27 years in uniform, our military has to train to fight our enemies on the battlefield, not police women and children trying to cross our borders.
This is likely a first in Trump's attempts to weaken our military - on orders from his Master in the Kremlin and his business partner in Beijing...
iknowall
Finally, after waiting for four years, someone treats the US as an independent country again.
Trump built the wall last time, and this time he is sending enforcers to put an end to the out-of-control policy of the Biden Administration of letting anyone and everyone into the US.
stormcrow
Are the U.S. troops supposed to shoot at illegals and their kids as they run across the border?!
bass4funk
Well, Biden and Myorkas should have thought of that before allowing millions to come in, I think it is a great idea that is long, long overdue.
It is already weakened by the last leaders of the admin. They are trying to fix it, because at this present time, we are losing recruits.
Hardly. Anyway, Kudos that they are finally doing this, just fantastic!
wallace
It's illegal to use the military for civilian purposes.
The Posse Comitatus Act bars federal troops from participating in civilian law enforcement except when expressly authorized by law.
There are many statutory exceptions to the Posse Comitatus Act, but the most important one is the Insurrection Act. Under this law, in response to a state government’s request, the president may deploy the military to suppress an insurrection in that state.
Randy Johnson
Sending troops to protect the border is totally legal because this is an invasion.
Blacklabel
the President declared a national emergency at the border, so there goes your Posse Act.
nandakandamanda
Feeling sorry for the ordinary troops who will have come from many backgrounds, having to use force against people who are not aggressive and are obviously not their enemies.
Blacklabel
Also Trump doing this deployment and shutting down the border on Day 2 means: Joe Biden could have done the same thing, yet chose not to.
lincolnman
Why would Biden need to do that?
There was an "impenetrable, Mexico-funded border wall" that Trump built in his four years - as he promised and vowed he would....right?
Randy Johnson
Why would Biden need to do that?
There was an "impenetrable, Mexico-funded border wall" that Trump built in his four years - as he promised and vowed he would....right?
The political left is so horrendously disingenuous it is mind boggling. The biden regime completely made a mockery of our sovereignty and it is sad that they resort to their endless interference of 45 wanting/needing to build a wall. Offended by everything, ashamed of nothing.
lincolnman
Calm down, and just answer the question - why would Biden need to do anything with the border when Trump kept his promise to build an impenetrable border wall that Mexico paid for?
Randy Johnson
The wall of great democrat interfence. Endless and constant interference at that.
So, the democrats thought why deal with a wall when you can fly illegal migrants right into the heart of the country at taxpayer cost.
Randy Johnson
And the biden regime was selling off wall parts/materials at the end of his nightmarish 4 years when he could have helped regain our sovereignty.
lincolnman
Yep, that was a real MAGA-non-answer... At least he did admit Trump failed to keep his "wall" promise...
Blacklabel
We are looking to the future.
forward not back.
all this daily whining about past things was adjudicated in an election that Trump just won.
A election that you shamefully insisted he would lose.
Blacklabel
Biden would have cut a big door right in the middle of it anyway.
he sued Texas when they blocked the river with floating barriers.
bass4funk
It is also illegal to let in millions of illegal aliens and circumvent American sovereignty and security.
Well, at this point, they will prevail given the circumstances of what the last admin did in order to save our nation. Not the first time a Constitutional law was overwritten.
OssanAmerica
I don't see how Trump can direct US troops to do this unless he succesfully declares the border crossings as a National Security Issue.
bass4funk
Well, exactly. The only thing they have are just insults and zero solutions, the petty insults make themselves feel good, but it helps no one, this is why they are not in power, people are starting to realize that they are all just talk and nothing more.
Blacklabel
“Heeeee didn’t (insert disingenuous nonsense and/or random whining)”
Answer: ok sure whatever. He didn’t (yet).
All that matters: the American people re-elected him anyway to do it and he is doing it now.