Acting Defense Secretary Pat Shanahan approved a request from the Department of Homeland Security for 320 additional US troops at the southern border, and has approved expanded authorities that allow them to come into direct contact ! with migrants and asylum seekers.
This approval is being reported by just about ALL news outlets this morning.
Shanahan, who signed the order late yesterday afternoon to send lawyers, cooks and drivers, also agreed to provide the waivers on troops’ interactions ! with migrants and asylum seekers.
Training? Supervision? Direction?
You know, the elements to make the trains run on time!!!
The Defense Department in 2006 instituted an internal policy prohibiting military personnel from coming into contact with migrants, a response to the deployment that year of more than 6,000 National Guard members.
US law also prohibits the military from acting in a law-enforcement capacity on US soil, and yesterday’s order states the troops won’t perform law-enforcement functions.
Seems like a thin ice mission, when having to stand on a heavy, and stressful workload, to me.
Approximately 2,900 active-duty U.S. troops and 2,000 members of National Guard units are now stationed along the US-Mexican border.
The entire quasi-system, on the southern border, seems to any cognitive outsider, to be severely hampered by legal and logistical challenges and without capacity to hold families together; or even to release them quickly into the US while they wait for their cases to be adjudicated.
Tic toc, tic toc…
Lobster on the Prairie 