A February 15 Washington Post article is headlined: “Soldiers are arriving at the border — but hardly any migrants are crossing”. The real focus is in the subheader: “Trump’s order to send troops to the border comes as the number of migrant crossings is plummeting. Residents in some border cities wonder what the soldiers will be doing”. It’s a classic example of the “Butterfield Fallacy”, but in short — the troops are there to help Border Patrol, and as long as they remain, the number of crossings will likely remain low.
A History of Troops at the Border
In December, I provided an extensive timeline of military involvement in immigration enforcement; in short, Trump isn’t the first president to send troops to assist Border Patrol in achieving its mission of stopping drugs, other contraband, and migrants from illegally crossing the Southwest border.
In May 2006, President George W. Bush sent National Guard soldiers and airmen there as part of “Operation Jump Start”, and the Obama administration followed that up with a similar program known as “Operation Phalanx”.
A “phalanx” is a “tactical formation consisting of a block of heavily armed infantry standing shoulder to shoulder in files several ranks deep”.
That’s a slightly inapt but still appropriate description of why those National Guard troops were there — as a show of force with the added value of providing Border Patrol agents technical, surveillance, intelligence, and transportation assistance.
Trump used military engineers to implement infrastructure improvements — including but not exclusively erecting fencing — along the border, and in October 2018, he launched what was called “Operation Faithful Patriot”.
Under Faithful Patriot, active-duty troops were deployed to the border to provide DHS “with ‘planning assistance, engineering support, fixed and rotary wing aviation support to move personnel’ as well as medical assistance, temporary housing and protective equipment for border patrol members”.
Even the last administration sent troops there. In May 2023, Biden’s defense chief, Lloyd Austin, sent 1,500 active-duty troops to the border to bolster the 2,500 National Guard troops who were already there.
As the Department of Defense (DOD) explained 10 months later: “Today between 2,500 and 3,000 military personnel are deployed to the Southwest border, supporting [CBP] activities. DOD has supported this mission for 18 of the last 21 years”.
‘3,600 Servicemen and Servicewomen’
Which brings me to the February 15 Washington Post article. The paper reports:
Several hundred active-duty soldiers arrived in the Texas city of Del Rio in late January after President Donald Trump declared an invasion and ordered troops to deploy to the southern border. The U.S. Defense Department says 3,600 servicemen and servicewomen, mostly from the U.S. Army and Marines, have been sent to help patrol the nation’s land border with Mexico.
. . .
Before Trump took office, there were 2,200 active-duty soldiers deployed at the border since 2018. Now that number has climbed to 5,000 and is expected to grow.
So far, so good. As the foregoing history of military involvement at the border suggests, those 2,800 extra soldiers and Marines are more than have traditionally been deployed to the line in the past, but keep in mind the Southwest border is 1,954 miles long, and the approximately 17,000 Border Patrol agents can use the assistance.
The Post continues, however:
But their arrival comes at one of the quietest moments at the border in the past decade. Agents with the Border Patrol sector that includes Del Rio and the neighboring city of Eagle Pass have been apprehending fewer than 50 people a day since late January. That’s a stark decline from 2023, when as many as 5,000 migrants surrendered to agents daily after crossing the Rio Grande.
Locals say they welcome the tax revenue and extra boots on the ground. But it’s not clear to them why they are needed now.
The Trump Effect
My colleague Todd Bensman coined the term “Trump Effect” to describe the decline in illegal entries at the border during the beginning of the first Trump administration.
That effect was real, as CBP’s FY 2017 statistics reveal. Apprehensions that fiscal year hit a monthly high of more than 47,000 in November 2016, and then fell to fewer than 19,000 in February 2017 (Trump’s first full month in office) before cratering to just over 14,500 two months later, in April.
From there, entries began a steady ascent through FY 2018 before hitting a Trump 1.0 monthly peak of nearly 133,000 in May 2019. Trump’s DHS realized that it had a problem and began implementing the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP), better known as “Remain in Mexico”, and other deterrence policies in response, which finally drove illegal entries down again.
Why didn’t the Trump Effect last? Because smugglers identified loopholes by sending migrants across and determining who got detained and who didn’t.
Single adults were detained, but adults travelling with children in “family units” were released thanks to a poorly reasoned 2015 district court decision, and word quickly went out that the only way to make it across successfully was to bring a kid with you.
Here are the stats: In April 2017, just 10 percent of illegal entrants were in FMUs. In FY 2018, 27 percent of apprehensions involved aliens in FMUs. Then, of the 132,856 Border Patrol Southwest border apprehensions in May 2019, 63.6 percent involved family-unit aliens.
Remain in Mexico worked because DHS returned aliens back across the border regardless of whether they were single adults or came in family units, essentially negating the pernicious impact of that 2015 court decision.
MPP worked in driving the family numbers down, bringing security to the border. Want proof?
There were 30,389 Southwest border apprehensions in February 2020 — the month before Title 42 took effect — and just 15.3 percent involved aliens in FMUs. Even that statistic understates MPP’s impact: Both the numerator (total apprehensions) and the denominator (FMU apprehensions, 4,610) decreased significantly from the prior May.
Preparing for the Rebound
We are again seeing the impacts of the Trump Effect, but Trump 2.0 has plainly learned the key lesson of Trump 1.0 — smugglers don’t stop just because their trade in human misery becomes more difficult. And this time, the president is getting ready for the rebound.
The U.S. military relies on what it calls “actionable intelligence”, information that “provides commanders and soldiers a high level of shared situational understanding, delivered with the speed, accuracy and timeliness”, to achieve success.
In the border context, that means keeping track of who’s coming between the ports, as well as gathering intel from Mexican partners on what’s happening on the other side of the line.
Border Patrol has the ability to compile such information, but migrant surges can strain its capacity to do so. The military will assist agents in surveillance and intelligence gathering, freeing those agents to make apprehensions.
That said, the very presence of soldiers and Marines on the border will act as a deterrent for would-be smugglers and illegal migrants.
The Post article focuses on Del Rio, a border town 300 miles northwest of the Rio Grande Valley, that saw many of the biggest migrant surges under Biden — and its most notorious.
That’s where 15,000-plus migrants (mostly from Haiti) converged in September 2021 from across the Rio Grande, overwhelming Border Patrol’s capacity to maintain order and provide basic services, and throwing the White House into chaos.
When I was there a month before, a sheriff’s deputy drove me to the river to see what was, even then, a seemingly endless line of migrants. I’ll never forget the smug stare of one smuggler, approximately 20 years old, who was portaging luggage across the water.
Thanks to the military presence described in the Post, only the heartiest — or most foolhardy — smuggler would make that trip now. The Marines I know don’t like smug.
‘The Threat to Our Communities’
Which brings me to the last benefit of that military presence — boosting Border Patrol’s capacity to stop “got-aways”, aliens who enter illegally with no intention of being apprehended.
According to DHS estimates, even in FY 2017, when — thanks to the Trump Effect — Southwest border apprehensions dropped to a 46-year low, agents only successfully interdicted about 79 percent of all illegal entrants who came over the Southwest border (and just 72 percent in Del Rio sector).
The 5,000 troops deployed to the border mean that there are now that many more U.S. government assets to keep track of everything — and everyone — coming across.
Biden’s last Border Patrol chief, Jason Owens, told CBS News in March 2024 that:
what's keeping me up at night is the ... known got-aways. ... Why are they risking their lives and crossing in areas where we can't get to? Why are they hiding? What do they have to hide? What are they bringing in? What is their intent? Where are they coming from? We simply don't know the answers to those questions. Those things for us are what represent the threat to our communities.
Thanks to those soldiers and Marines, Owens and the rest of us can sleep a little easier.
The Butterfield Fallacy
Wall Street Journal editor James Taranto often references what he terms the “Butterfield Fallacy”, which he defined as “misidentifying as a paradox what is in fact a simple cause-and-effect relationship”.
He named it after an erstwhile New York Times reporter who repeatedly wrote articles questioning why incarceration rates were increasing even while crime was falling — apparently failing to grasp the correlation between jailing criminals and decreases in criminality itself.
Taranto explained: “The Butterfield Fallacy is rooted in ideological prejudice. The typical New York Times reporter does not like the idea of sending people to prison.”
Not to cast aspersions, but the Post appears to be suffering from the Butterfield Fallacy when it implicitly asks why Trump would send more troops to the border even as illegal crossings have fallen. The most likely answer is that those troops are a big part of the reason why few migrants are crossing now — and in turn why more deployments are likely on the way.
President Biden repeatedly claimed that he needed Congress to act to secure the border, but as I told Congress in March 2024, he already possessed all the power he needed; he just needed the will to use it. Biden didn’t have that will, but thus far at least, his successor does — including the will to send the Marines.