With his poll numbers tanking — his 36% approval is the lowest of his presidency — Joe Biden surprised no one by announcing a 90-day dispatch of 1,500 active-duty troops to the southern border in an attempt to show he’s getting tough on the flow of illegal migrants and fentanyl streaming into the country on his watch.
Thursday’s expiration of Title 42, the pandemic-era policy that granted Border Patrol agents greater authority to expel migrants for public-health reasons, will add thousands more migrants each day to the already-record totals.
But Biden’s troop-deployment gambit falls flat as a solution to the crisis. And it insults our troops by shunting them primarily to clerical and warehousing activities instead of the complex military maneuvers for which they are trained and where they could make the most difference.
I know because I was one of them — and I served on the border.
This deployment isn’t a serious plan, and it fails to fix the problem Biden’s policies have created — specifically the lack of basic enforcement capability on the border.
In announcing the three-month mission, a Pentagon spokesman noted the units “will fill critical capability gaps such as ground-based detection and monitoring, data entry and warehouse support until” Customs and Border Protection “can address these needs through contracted support.”
The governor of the state with the longest stretch of border, Texas’ Greg Abbott, derided the feckless deployment for that wonky mission, tweeting, “Biden says he will deploy 1,500 troops to the border — primarily to do paperwork. And only for 90 days. This does nothing to stop illegal immigration.”
Indeed; Abbott noted, “I deployed up to 10,000 Texas National Guard to the border to fill the gaps created by Biden’s reckless open border policies.”
Deploying active-duty troops to the porous border is a good thing — but needs to be done in the right way. As a young active-duty Marine officer years ago, I was sent to the Arizona border with a detachment of reconnaissance Marines as part of Joint Task Force Six to do real work, not paperwork.
With the latest, most sophisticated thermal and night-vision equipment, and standard M-16s and other weapons for troop protection, our unit tracked migrants and drug smugglers as they crossed into the United States and alerted Border Patrol agents in real time — and they rounded them up swiftly and efficiently.
US reconnaissance Marines are among the best in the world for such a serious military assignment, given their ability to gather intelligence across vast areas of land with just a handful of operators and do so undetected by enemy forces, in this case dangerous smugglers and human traffickers.
Begun in the late 1980s, Joint Task Force Six allowed specialized active-duty units from all services to deploy and work together with Border Patrol personnel to stem the flow of illegal migrants and drugs in sectors where they needed help. And to do so respecting laws against the use of active-duty forces within US borders for civil law enforcement.
It was a serious and important tactical mission for highly trained military units, not a trivial clerical paperwork assignment designed to cover a chief executive’s behind politically when his public polls take a plunge southward.
Frankly, it would have been stupid and insulting to send our Marine unit and many other specialized active-duty detachments like it to the border as props to push paper in a warehouse.
The good news is the American people aren’t buying Biden’s shameful misuse of our troops and see this maneuver for what it is — a last-minute dodge by an unpopular president trying to shore up his own political standing instead of solving the immigration crisis as it’s about to get even worse.
Biden can no longer continue sleepwalking on the border. His deployment of 1,500 of our finest to do clerical work insults our troops and fails to fix the problem.
John Ullyot is a US Marine Corps veteran and former spokesman for the National Security Council. He served on the US-Mexico border with a Marine reconnaissance unit in support of Joint Task Force Six.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
