The Department of Homeland Security asked for 20,000 National Guard troops to be sent to assist immigration enforcement in the US, a department official said to CNN on Friday.
“Homeland Security will do everything in their power with the tools and resources they have to take out criminal illegal aliens like gang members, murderers, pedophiles, and other dangerous criminals from our country. American citizen safety is our highest concern,” DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin announced in a statement.
The request, under review by the Pentagon, is one of a series of new proposals by the Trump administration to step up the arrests of illegal immigrants and implement President Donald Trump’s promise of a campaign of mass deportations, sources said this week.
The push will involve requesting Border Patrol agents to fan out throughout the country and comes on the heels of the Justice Department having started to increase the enforcement of immigration-related crime in cities nationwide.
Trump administration officials were not pleased with the more glacial rate of interior deportations of illegal aliens across the country, CNN has reported, and there were some angry disagreements about it between the White House and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, several sources added.
But interior arrests tend to be manpower- and resource-heavy — more so than border detaining migrants — and that’s one of the reasons why the administration is now trying to hire more personnel, like thousands of more Guardsmen, for the task.
The National Guard soldiers will also be helping the Border Patrol agents in the states whose governors have agreed, since the Guard soldiers would be operating on state and not federal orders under Title 32 authority, a Defense Department official has already told CNN.
States under the plan would deploy their National Guard under proper authorities, as Texas Governor Greg Abbott did in 2021 when he started sending thousands of state troopers and Texas National Guard troops to the border to assist in enforcing immigration.
Earlier this year, the US Customs and Border Protection and the Texas National Guard entered into a memorandum of understanding to grant some immigration jurisdiction to some members of the Texas Guard under the jurisdiction of CBP officials.
The National Guard soldiers helping to augment immigration enforcement will be asked to back up arresting units in the field and provide what’s called “force protection,” an official explained.
A previous defense official had already told CNN that the Guard won’t be doing any arresting but only have a supporting function. Technically, however, since the Guard units will be under the control of the state and not the federal government, the units are exempt from the law forbidding the military from conducting domestic law enforcement called the Posse Comitatus Act, the Brennan Center states.
The US Army has deployed thousands more active duty soldiers, not only National Guard soldiers, to the southern border in the past few months, but they have been patrolling, building barricades and providing logistical support to DHS — not apprehending.
Federal, or Title 10, deployed active duty forces cannot be applied to domestic law enforcement except when the president declares the Insurrection Act. The Pentagon and DHS last month refused to recommend to Trump that he employ the Insurrection Act at this point, CNN had reported previously. The agencies told Trump that the crossings were low and that they had no other authorities at the time to help deal with the flow of migration, officials added.