Trump and Miller attempted to deploy 250,000 troops to US-Mexico border in Spring 2020
In an article published Tuesday, the New York Times revealed that Donald Trump’s fascist right-hand man Stephen Miller attempted to deploy 250,000 troops on US soil to close the 2,000-mile border with Mexico in the spring of 2020 with Trump’s apparent support. The Times also reported that Trump and Miller proposed invading Mexico with military assassination squads to kill gang members around the same time.
Trump and Miller’s plan was part of a fascist political strategy that played out over the course of 2020 and 2021 and poses a real threat today. The plan to deploy the army on US soil in March and April 2020 and carry out military action within Mexico would have transformed major US cities like San Diego, Phoenix and El Paso into armed encampments, with confrontations between soldiers, Mexican troops and mass demonstrations from both sides of the border leading to martial law or full-scale war. For over a year, the military and Democratic Party leadership have withheld this information from the public.
The Times acquired details of the Trump-Miller plan through discussions with high-level military officials. “With the coronavirus pandemic raging, Stephen Miller, the architect of Mr. Trump’s immigration agenda, had urged the Homeland Security Department [DHS] to develop a plan for the number of troops that would be needed to seal the entire 2,000-mile border with Mexico,” the Times wrote.
In response to the outbreak of the pandemic, which triggered wildcat strikes and a collapse of the stock market, Miller appealed to a network of fascist forces within the state and military in an attempt to scapegoat immigrants for COVID-19 and prepare for broader crackdowns on social opposition. The Times report explained, “As the administration debated ways to secure the southern border against the virus, Mr. Miller urged top officials at the Department of Homeland Security to come up with the actual number of troops it would take to shut the entire border down.”
Miller, who now leads a major pro-Trump think tank, recently made his motivations clear, telling the Times, “With economies and health care systems faltering across the planet, our southwest border would have become the epicenter of illicit Covid fueled migration — one giant, never-ending superspreader event. Instead, the border was successfully sealed and the would-be violators and spreaders got the message and stayed home.”
In response to Miller’s appeal, either DHS or the Pentagon then agreed to propose a deployment of 250,000 troops, more than were ever deployed at one time in Iraq or Afghanistan. According to the Times, Miller’s allies in DHS did not proceed with the request through the normal chain of command, but went directly to the armed forces’ Northern Command, a combat command center established in the aftermath of September 11, 2001 to oversee troop deployments in North America, including on US soil.
The deployment was one prong of a two-part strategy. “Around the same time that officials considered the huge deployment to the American side of the border with Mexico,” the Times wrote, “Mr. Trump also pressed his top aides to send forces into Mexico itself to hunt drug cartels, much like American commandos have tracked and killed terrorists in Afghanistan or Pakistan, the officials said.”
Trump and Miller are well aware that such a move would have immediately led to mass demonstrations across the United States and would have also provoked retribution by gang networks functioning in major American cities, likely resulting in attacks on police officers or government officials in cities like Los Angeles, Chicago and New York. This would have then been used to justify deploying the military across major cities, and not just those near the southern border. The revelations shed new light on the Canadian government’s protests in March 2020 over the Trump administration plans to deploy troops to the northern border as well.
According to the Times report, the leadership of the military ultimately made the decision not to accept the proposals. “After a brief but contentious confrontation with Mr. Miller in the Oval Office,” the report notes, implying Trump’s presence, “Mr. Esper ended consideration of the idea at the Pentagon.”
The military’s opposition to the troop deployment stemmed not from the defense of democracy, but from its view that the move would require pulling troops back from its numerous bases abroad, limiting its ability to conduct imperialist war. The Times noted that the military felt the move “would undermine American military readiness around the world.”
The Times reported that the military, Miller and Trump agreed to compromise by letting Trump invoke Title 42 to ban all immigration into the US, evidently satisfying Miller. The Times reported, “Mr. Miller, who had prevailed in previous clashes with military officials over troop deployments to the border, did not press the issue, according to a person familiar with his thinking.”
Efforts to deploy the military in the spring were an escalation of a strategy that had developed over the course of 2017 through 2019 and would explode in the run-up to the 2020 election and 2021 inauguration. Miller indeed “prevailed” over the military and Democrats, who acquiesced to Trump’s decision to deploy 5,000 troops to the border in 2018.
The fact that the Pentagon brass and Democratic Party leadership withheld details of this plot from the public for over a year facilitated Trump as he escalated his fascist strategy over the latter half of 2020 and into 2021. Just weeks after the 250,000-troop proposal in May and June 2020, Trump attempted to invoke the Insurrection Act in response to the protests over the police killing of George Floyd, again threatening to deploy the military to major cities. The fascist plot continued through Trump’s refusal to accept the outcome of the November election and his appeal to fascist militia to “stand back and stand by,” culminating in the January 6, 2021 putsch attempt to stop the certification of Biden’s victory.
The cover-up continues today. Within hours of the publication of the Times report, the article was removed from the paper’s online front page. By Wednesday morning, there was no reporting of the revelations on the online front pages of the Times, Washington Post, Politico, The Hill, ABC News, NBC News, CBS News or CNN.
Although Joe Biden pledged that his presidency would “restore democracy,” he and the Democratic Congress have continued to carry out Trump’s immigration policies, strengthening the repressive apparatus that is lying in wait for Trump’s comeback and promoting the anti-immigrant propaganda for Trump and Miller’s political gristmill.
Earlier this month, Biden and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin deployed 3,000 National Guard members to prevent immigrants from escaping war and poverty at the US-Mexico border.
The Biden administration has detained 1.3 million immigrants since his inauguration, over three times the average of yearly detentions under Obama and Trump. The Biden administration has announced it will restore Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy, which abolishes the right to enter the US to apply for asylum. Earlier this week, Biden’s nominee for head of Customs and Border Protection, Chris Magnus, testified that Title 42 is “absolutely imperative” and said he supports Donald Trump’s proposal to expand the border wall.
There is no constituency for democratic rights within the ruling class. The Democratic Party continues to praise Republicans as their “colleagues” even as Trump and his fascist supporters consolidate power with state Republican parties in the lead-up to the 2022 midterms. The Democrats have refused to conduct thorough, public investigations into Trump’s role on January 6. They are paring down their own social spending bills and guaranteeing a degree of social and economic desperation that Miller and Trump will seek to exploit.
The task of defending democratic rights falls to the working class, which is mobilizing itself in a massive global strike wave, the likes of which have not been seen in many decades. It is this objective movement that has the power to thwart Trump and Miller’s plots, which depend on the silence of the Democratic Party and the corporate media and which have next to no support among broad masses of working people in the US and internationally. The billions-strong global working class must be informed of the danger and its immense social power activated on the basis of a revolutionary socialist program.
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Psaki: Biden Drove Through the Border ‘When He Was on the Campaign Trail in 2008’
(CNSNews.com) - White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said Friday that President Joe Biden “did drive through the border” while on the campaign trail in 2008.
As CNSNews.com reported, when asked Thursday whether he has plan to visit the southern border, Biden told a CNN town hall, “I've been there before, and I haven't -- I mean, I know it well. I guess I should go down.”
Fox News White House Correspondent Peter Doocy asked Psaki, “Following up on something else the president said last night. Why did President Biden say he has been to the border?”
PSAKI: Well Peter, as you may have seen, there’s been reporting that he did drive through the border when he was on the campaign trail in 2008, and he is certainly familiar with the fact - and it stuck with him - with the fact that in El Paso, the border goes right through the center of town, but what the most important thing everyone should know and understand is that the president has worked on these issues throughout his entire career and is well-versed in every aspect of our immigration system, including the border.
That includes when he was vice president, and he went to Mexico and Central America 10 times to address border issues and talk about what we can do to reduce the number of migrants who are coming to the border. He worked in a bipartisan manner with senators like Ted Kennedy, Harry Reid, John McCain and others to push for comprehensive immigration reform. He does not need a visit to the border to know what a mess was left by the last administration. That’s his view.
DOOCY: Does that count as a visit? He said, I’ve been there before. You’re saying he drove by for a few minutes? Does that count?
PSAKI: What is the root cause? Where are people coming from who are coming to the border, Peter?
DOOCY: The president said that he --
PSAKI: I’m asking you a question, because I think people should understand the context. Where do people-- where to people come--
DOOCY: I’m asking you--
PSAKI: Okay, I’ll answer it for you. People come from Central America and Mexico to go to the border. The president has been to those countries 10 times to talk about border issues. There is a focus right now on a photo-op. The president does not believe a photo-op is the same as solutions. That may be a difference he has with Republicans.
DOOCY: But that’s not what he said either. He said, I guess I should go down. So does he think that he needs a photo-op? Is that what he’s saying?
PSAKI: He doesn’t, and that’s a fundamental disagreement he has. I would say the former president went to the border at least once, maybe more. You may know the numbers. How did that immigration policy result, Peter? That immigration policy resulted in separating kids from their parents, building a border wall that’s feckless and that costs billions of dollars for taxpayers. The president fundamentally disagrees on how we need to approach the immigration issue.
DOOCY: Has anything changed at the border between 2008 when he drove by and 2021?
PSAKI: Aside from the fact that migrants are still coming to the border through the course of Democratic and Republican presidents and the need to reform the immigration system is even farther along overdue? No, but we need to work with Democrats and Republicans to get that done.
Biden: 'I Guess I Should' Visit the Border; 'I Haven't Had a Whole Hell of a Lot of Time to Get Down'
(CNSNews.com) - "Do you have plans to visit the southern border?" Anderson Cooper asked President Joe Biden at a CNN town hall Thursday night.
"I've been there before, and I haven't -- I mean, I know it well. I guess I should go down," Biden responded. (For the record, it's been many years since Biden visited the U.S.-Mexico border, if he ever has, that is.)
"But the whole point of it is, I haven't had a whole hell of a lot of time to get down," Biden continued:
I've been spending time going around looking at the $900 billion worth of damage done by -- by hurricanes and floods and weather and traveling around the world.
But, I plan on -- now, my wife Jill has been down. She's been on both sides of the river. She's seen the circumstances there. She's looked into those places.
You notice you're not seeing a lot of pictures of kids lying on top of one another with, you know, with -- you know, looks like tarps on top of them. We've been able to deal with that. We've been able to significantly increase funding through the HHS, Health and Human Services, to provide shelter for these kids and people.
But, there's much more to be done. And -- and I realize -- I think it is -- it's a thing that concerns me the most about being able to get control of it, because I got to, number one, get enough funding to provide for immediate determination of whether or not someone that is, in fact, legitimately claiming a right to stay in the country because of legitimate fears, and purely for economic reasons to get in line but not get in the country.
So what we're doing is bringing a lot of folks who are coming in, and they're doing ankle bracelets instead of people being sent back, depending on whether or not their claim appears to be legitimate.
Biden told the woman who asked the question that his administration is "making more progress than you think" on border issues, including the handling of minors. He said that only 504 children are now in the custody of the Border Patrol, down from 5,000, he said.
(Thousands of undocumented children have been released and shipped to other areas of the country, sometimes in the dark of night.)
Biden also took credit for devising a program "where we now provide funding" to Central American countries "to change the circumstance on the ground."
"For example, you're in a circumstance where, you know, people don't just sit around their kitchen table and say, I've got a great idea. Let's sell everything we have, give it to coyote, let them -- take us across the border, drop us in a desert, place they don't want us, won't that be fun?
"People do it because they're desperate. They're desperate," Biden said. "And what I've been trying to do, and I'm trying to do in this legislation as well, is get funding so we have funding for immigration officers to be able to hear cases immediately of whether or not they justify having asylum granted to them."
(He meant that immigration officers would hear asylum claims in the countries before would-be migrants started their journey.)
Some Democrats and immigration activists have blasted the Biden administration for maintaining Title 42, a public health authority implemented by the Trump administration's CDC, that requires the immediate deportation of adult aliens because of the COVID pandemic.
Biden defended it on Thursday: "We maintained that because of the extent of the -- of the continued extent of COVID in those countries from which people are coming. It's very, very high. "And so, we maintained the policy. We're not sending back children. We send back adults, and we send back large families. But we don't send back children in that circumstance.
"And so, that's why I have a proposal to provide for over a billion doses of COVID vaccine to the rest of the world, including a significant portion to Latin and Central America," Biden said.
Record 2 Million Migrants Cross Border Between Ports of Entry During Past 12 Months
More than two million migrants illegally crossed the border from Mexico into the United States during Fiscal Year 2021. The crossings include 1.66 million apprehended by Border Patrol agents and an estimated 400,000 classified as “got aways.”
Border Patrol agents apprehended a record-setting 1,659,206 migrants who illegally crossed the border from Mexico during the recently ended fiscal year, according to the Southwest Border Land Encounters report released on Friday by U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials. Additionally, nearly 400,000 more migrants are estimated to be “got aways,” information received from Border Patrol officials revealed.
“The men and women of CBP continued to rise admirably to the challenge, despite the strain associated with operating during a global pandemic that has claimed far too many lives among our frontline personnel,” CBP Acting Commissioner Troy Miller said in a written statement. “CBP will continue its work to ensure safety and security at our borders, while managing a fair and orderly immigration system, and facilitating the legitimate trade and travel that is vital to the American economy.”
The apprehension of nearly 1.66 million migrants who illegally crossed the border between ports of entry represents an increase of nearly 315 percent over the previous fiscal year’s total of 400,651, the report indicates. The apprehension of migrant families skyrocketed by more than 763 percent. Unaccompanied minor apprehensions jumped by 374 percent and single adults by 235 percent.
The Rio Grande Valley Sector continues to lead the nine sectors located along the southwest border with Mexico. Agents in this sector apprehended nearly 550,00 migrants — an increase of nearly 506 percent over the previous year’s total of just over 90,000.
This is followed by the Del Rio Sector with nearly 260,000 apprehensions — an increase of 543 percent over the 40,342 apprehended in FY2020.
The five Texas-based sectors account for 1,151,796 of the southwest border apprehensions (69 percent). Those include more than 683,000 single adults, 355,000 family units, and 113,700 unaccompanied minors.
“This year’s extraordinary migration wave has posed dire logistical, humanitarian and political challenges for President Biden during the first months of his administration, which promised to usher in an “orderly” and “humane” border policy,” CBS News reported.
“I’ve never seen it as bad as what it is right now,” National Border Patrol Council President Brandon Judd said in an article published by NPR. “We just don’t have the manpower and resources to do what we need to do to both detect and apprehend everything that’s crossing the border.”
Bob Price serves as associate editor and senior news contributor for the Breitbart Texas-Border team. He is an original member of the Breitbart Texas team. Price is a regular panelist on Fox 26 Houston’s What’s Your Point? Sunday-morning talk show. Follow him on Twitter @BobPriceBBTX and Face
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