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"more funding for border initiatives" =/= secure the border
We need more funds...to house and process illegals?
My favorite part of the article:
"We will not support your efforts to secure the border until you do more to secure the border."Biden has faced intense criticism over his border policies from both parties, with Republicans saying they are unwilling to negotiate on immigration legislation or more funding for border initiatives until the administration does more to secure the border.
And you morons lap it up.
"more funding for border initiatives" =/= secure the border
We need more funds...to house and process illegals?
Why no subtle little letter to Trump? Instead, fake outrage theatrics, as usual for the Democrats.
Well, they are sending a few thousand troops to the border to act as Walmart type greeters. Like that they can just bypass processing/housing them. Smile and wave campaign.
lol, pot meet kettleWhy no subtle little letter to Trump? Instead, fake outrage theatrics, as usual for the Democrats.
lol “we”, says the Polack
Not sure what evidence you have that the outrage was fake. Maybe you don't relate to empathy.Why no subtle little letter to Trump? Instead, fake outrage theatrics, as usual for the Democrats.
And GTFO with your suggestion that Republicans don't engage in outrage theater, your VP candidate bought an NFL ticket for a game he never intended to sit through just to stage a butthurt walkout over players kneeling, and you morons have been angry about a beer can for a solid month.More projection from conservatives.
Scared Qhris living scared. "Save us, Marjorie!"
Dishonest tweeter uses pic from 2018, Qhris duped: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article...migration-trum
Open borders Brandon strikes again.
Asylum seeking about to get much more punitive.
Lawfare looks at the deployment through the lens of emergency powers. One recurring theme is emergency authorization for activities that are already well-founded legally.
Acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Joe Dunford tour a section of the U.S.-Mexico border in 2019. (Joint Chiefs of Staff / Dominique A. Pineiro, https://www.jcs.mil/Media/Photos/igphoto/2002092976/)
https://www.lawfareblog.com/bidens-r...outhern-borderOn May 2, the Department of Defense announced that an additional 1,500 active-duty soldiers and Marines will be sent to the southern border to support the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). There have been reports for some time about Biden’s adoption of Trump-era southern border policies. The same can be said of the striking similarities between how the Trump and Biden administrations use law (both emergency and non-emergency powers) to sustain the continued deployment of thousands of military personnel at the southern border.
Last week the Defense Department announced that Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin approved a 90-day deployment of 1,500 active-duty personnel in response to a request for assistance from DHS, the usual forcing mechanism for deployments at the southern border. These personnel will provide “ground-based detection and monitoring,” “data entry,” and “warehouse support.” And the public was informed that the Defense Department will try to replace these active-duty forces with reserve component (for example, Army Reserve or Army National Guard) personnel and contracted support. Importantly, these 1,500 personnel won’t be alone. There are already 2,500 military personnel providing “detection and monitoring” and “aviation support” to DHS at the southern border.
On his first day in office, President Biden signed Proclamation 10142, which terminated the national emergency declared by President Trump at the southern border. The proclamation largely criticized the border wall, which in part was built using a construction authority (10 U.S.C. § 2808) that Trump made available through the emergency declaration. But this declaration did more than just pave the way to building a wall. It also made available 10 U.S.C. § 12302. This statute authorizes the secretaries of the military departments, in response to a national emergency, to order any member or unit of any reserve component (including National Guard personnel) to active duty, without their consent, for no longer than two years. It’s likely, though reliable numbers are not readily available, that at least some of the thousands of National Guard personnel sent to the border during the Trump administration were deployed under this authority.
Biden took the first step toward a return to emergency authority on Dec. 15, 2021. In Executive Order 14059, he found that “international drug trafficking ... cons utes an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States.” In response, he ordered the secretary of the treasury to impose specified sanctions and restricted the entry of noncitizens who qualified for such sanctions. On April 27, 2023, in Executive Order 14097, Biden again made the authority provided in § 12302 available to respond to this emergency.
Swapping out emergency authority to build a wall for emergency authority to sanction narcotraffickers, Executive Order 14097 in all but name resuscitates the operational authorities provided by Trump’s executive order. There is certainly a difference in rhetoric and policy focus—Trump’s centered on migration, Biden’s on drug trafficking. But as a legal matter, they both uncorked nearly unrestricted, easy access to military personnel for the southern border.
Statutory Authority for Southern Border Military DeploymentsNotwithstanding all the above, there’s actually very little in the way of emergency authority that the Defense Department needs to support DHS at the southern border. The relevant statutes authorizing Defense Department operational support have been on the books for decades. In this regard, the Trump administration was exceptional only in the number of personnel deployed under this legal framework.
While we aren’t told much about the law governing this newest 1,500-person deployment, we can s ch together a pretty detailed picture from publicly available information. I’ll approach it through the three buckets of legal questions relevant to analyzing Defense Department operational support to another federal agency: (a) What’s the operational authority for the activities that military personnel will perform? (b) What’s the mobilization authority under which the personnel will operate? and (c) What appropriation is legally available to fund the operation?
What about “data entry” and “warehouse support”? A few options seem available. For the Defense Department to use § 274, there must be some operation of equipment. That could plausibly include a soldier using a computer. Under this theory, the Defense Department would resort to 10 U.S.C. § 274(c), a catch-all for any support that doesn’t involve direct participation in law enforcement activities. There doesn’t seem to be a plausible way for warehouse support to fit here, unless using a hand truck or forklift cons utes using equipment. A capacious fallback, however, would be § 1059 of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for fiscal year 2016. It provides, in pertinent part, that the secretary of defense may support Customs and Border Protection “for purposes of increasing ongoing efforts to secure the southern land border of the United States” through, for example, the “deployment of members and units of the regular and reserve components of the Armed Forces to the southern land border of the United States.” That’s an incredibly broad authorization. Whatever is true about the probity of using troops as factotums and warehouse workers, both duties are certainly a deployment to the southern land border.
There’s a truly dizzying array of mobilization authorities, and no shortage of personnel issues, due to the way in which they interact and how they’ve been implemented by the Defense Department and the military departments. Thankfully, at least in the near term, this is likely to be the most straightforward part of the deployment. The Defense Department says that the 1,500 troops will be active-duty forces, meaning they don’t require an additional or separate mobilization for this support mission. But on the theory that, much like Chekov’s gun, a legal authority once made available must be used, I expect the Defense Department to use Biden’s proclamation to mobilize National Guard or other reserve component personnel under § 12302 in the future.
Factually, it seems like a difficult case to make for at least some of the support functions. The first criterion certainly doesn’t apply to any of them (none of this is part of a steady-state Defense Department mission). And it seems like a stretch, at best, to say that young troops need training in how to use a computer or move supplies in a warehouse. But these are factual judgment calls, and senior Defense Department officials have readily asserted a training value for similar duties in the past.
It’s entirely correct, as DHS notes, that the Department of Defense has for the vast majority of the past two decades provided support at the southern border. But easy access to any component of the Defense Department appears to be turning into a new normal, made available under shifting but substantially similar emergency declarations. Thousands of military personnel are consistently deployed to the border. And all of it is funded by the Defense Department. All of which is to say that, in an increasingly substantial way from which it may be increasingly difficult to retreat, U.S. border security has become a Defense Department mission.
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