Gen. CQ Brown, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is visiting troops along the U.S.-Mexico border Friday to assess the military’s progress in fortifying sections of the wall, coming as the Pentagon rapidly expands its border mission in line with President Donald Trump’s efforts to combat illegal immigration.
The military in the past month has quickly surged troops and equipment to the border, is seeking expanded authority for cooperation with Mexican forces, has conducted scores of deportation flights and is readying the detention facilities at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, to possibly house as many as 30,000 migrants.
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About 9,200 U.S. troops total are at the southern border, including 4,200 deployed under federal orders and about 5,000 National Guard troops under the control of governors.
The military has conducted 26 deportation flights to return migrants to their home countries, including military air flights to Guatemala, El Salvador, Ecuador, India, Honduras, Peru and Panama. It also has carried out 13 flights to transport migrants to Guantánamo.
U.S. Northern Command has increased manned surveillance flights along the U.S.-Mexico border to monitor drug cartels and the movement of fentanyl and is increasing its intelligence sharing with Mexico from those flights, Gen. Gregory Guillot told senators last week.
There are also unmanned U.S. drones conducting surveillance over Mexico’s airspace, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum told reporters Wednesday.
This week, Trump designated many of the gangs and cartels moving those drugs into the U.S. as foreign terrorist organizations, further increasing the pressure on their ability to move and providing law enforcement with what the State Department said are “additional tools to stop these groups.”
Guillot also told senators that Northern Command would seek expanded authority from Congress to conduct “more advise-and-assist types of operations between our forces and the tier one Mexican forces,” which are that country’s special forces units.
Securing the southern border is a top priority for the Trump administration, so much so that in a directive released Wednesday ordering the military to find $50 billion in program cuts by October, activities at the southern border were exempted.
“We’ve been defending other people’s borders for a long time — time to defend ours,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told journalists last week in Stuttgart, Germany. “So we’re sealing that border.”
Mexico agreed to send 10,000 of its own National Guard troops to the border to stave off Trump’s threat of imposing 25% tariffs. The Pentagon announced Wednesday that the U.S. and Mexico had reached an agreement to conduct “coordinated patrols on their respective side of the border,” increase information sharing and establish lines for immediate communications between the militaries.
“The agreement emphasizes that each country will respect the sovereignty of the other,” Hegseth’s chief of staff, Joseph Kasper, said in a statement.
There’s not a full tally on what the operations have cost to date, but one of the most visible aspects of the military operation — the deportation flights — are costing the government about $28,000 per hour. The flight to India, which deported 104 Indian migrants, cost more than $2.5 million.
Tara Copp is a Pentagon correspondent for the Associated Press. She was previously Pentagon bureau chief for Sightline Media Group.
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