US military ordering thousands more troops to southern border

Thousands of additional active duty US troops are being ordered to the southern US border with Mexico, just two days after President Donald Trump mandated that the US military step up its presence there, according to officials familiar with the matter.

Thousands of additional active duty US troops are being ordered to the southern US border with Mexico, just two days after President Donald Trump mandated that the US military step up its presence there, according to officials familiar with the matter. There are already roughly 2,200 active duty forces at the border as part of Joint Task Force-North, US Northern Command’s border mission based out of El Paso, Texas. They help support US Customs and Border Protection’s work there, performing mostly logistical and bureaucratic tasks like data entry, detection and monitoring, and vehicle maintenance. It is not yet clear which specific units are being ordered to the border. There is also a National Guard contingent at the border called Operation Lonestar, headed by the Texas National Guard. It’s unclear how many troops are there with the mission currently; the Texas Military Department has not responded to questions from CNN regarding the current number of troops assigned to the mission. The additional active duty troops being sent to the border this week will be doing much of the same, the officials said, and are expected to feed into and augment Joint Task Force-North. They will be helping to maintain operational readiness for Border Patrol, assisting in command-and-control centers, and providing more intelligence specialists to assess threats and migrant flows, according to sources familiar with the planning.