Trump Shuts Off Access to Asylum, Plans to Send 10,000 Troops to Border

A woman on the Paso del Norte International border bridge in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, learns the appointment she made through the U.S. Customs and Border Protection CBP One application was canceled soon after President Donald Trump was sworn into office.
12:35 JST, January 24, 2025
President Donald Trump is preparing to send around 10,000 troops to the southern border, where they will support Border Patrol agents under new orders to shut off access to asylum, according to a U.S. Customs and Border Protection briefing document obtained by The Washington Post.
The order directs border agents to block entry to migrants on the grounds that they have passed through countries where communicable diseases are present, without citing any specific health threat.
The Defense Department will send at least 1,500 additional active-duty ground troops to the southern border in what could be the first of several waves of deployments, said acting defense secretary Robert Salesses. Those forces will bolster about 2,500 who already were there. Other active-duty troops will pilot military planes to assist the Department of Homeland Security in deporting migrants who already are in detention, with DHS providing law enforcement on those flights, Salesses said.
“This is just the beginning,” he said in a statement Wednesday evening.
The CBP briefing, delivered Tuesday to senior staff at the agency’s headquarters in Washington by newly appointed Border Patrol Chief Mike Banks, instructs U.S. agents to use an extraordinary emergency authority to close the border. The only two Border Patrol officials who can authorize the release of an asylum seeker into the United States with a pending humanitarian claim are Banks and his deputy.
The briefing document is an early glimpse into the real-world application of the fusillade of executive orders Trump issued Monday, and their translation into field guidance for the Border Patrol’s 19,000 agents. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
During the coronavirus pandemic, the Trump administration used an emergency public health law to close off asylum access at U.S. borders. This time, Trump officials have not cited a specific disease, instead invoking emergency authorities with the argument that migrants could be carrying any transmissible illness.
The planning document calls for leveraging the government’s “full” authority under a section of the Immigration and Nationality Act that grants the president broad powers to suspend the entry of certain noncitizens into the United States.
A separate executive order Trump issued Monday declared a national emergency at the southern border and instructed the Pentagon to support CBP by sending troops, drones and other assets, while resuming border wall construction.
Border Patrol agents have been directed to hold any non-Mexican migrant for deportation via air, rather than attempting to return them to Mexico, the documents state. Those orders are expected to result in a significant increase in the number of detainees held in CBP custody over the coming weeks.
According to the CBP briefing documents, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is preparing to more than double its detention capacity by opening four new 10,000-bed facilities and 14 smaller sites with space for 700 to 1,000 people. The Defense Department may also utilize military bases as holding facilities, the document says. Trump officials have told lawmakers they will need billions of dollars in additional funding to meet the president’s deportation goals by ramping up ICE detention capacity.
Canada will be asked to accept migrants who cross illegally as well, it states.
CBP is holding about 5,500 detainees who recently crossed the southern border at its stations and temporary sites. The number of migrants taken into custody has fallen since Trump’s inauguration, according to preliminary enforcement data. On Tuesday, Trump’s first full day in office, about 800 migrants were taken into custody along the U.S.-Mexico border, down from a daily average of 1,300 during the week before Trump’s inauguration.
Border Patrol public information officers have been directed to highlight the agency’s muscular deployment in “deterring, denying, detecting, and interdictions at the border,” the document states.
U.S. officials who described the initial military buildup – first reported by CNN – said the personnel, including about 1,000 soldiers and 500 Marines, will be added to the roughly 2,500 who already were deployed there under the Biden administration. Discussions are underway to send thousands more, said one U.S. official familiar with the process, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue.
In a briefing at the Pentagon on Wednesday evening, senior officials told reporters that the deployments approved Wednesday are an “initial step” and likely to be followed by more. The mission could grow to 10,000, but it is too soon to say what ultimately is needed, they said.
The military personnel assigned to the border mission will have an array of missions, but nothing involving law enforcement unless it is determined later that that is necessary, the officials said. Their early assignments will include building additional barriers to slow entry to the United States – an echo of the first Trump administration, when active-duty forces deployed to the border and spent days stringing razor wire for hundreds of miles. The number of U.S. military personnel on the border then grew to about 8,000 in 2018, before eventually shrinking.
The Trump administration also will look to bolster surveillance efforts on the border with the military. That effort could include additional manned or unmanned aircraft, a senior military official said.
Trump administration officials are carrying out his campaign promises at breakneck speed, directing the nation’s most powerful agencies – the Justice Department, Homeland Security and Defense – to prioritize immigration and border enforcement.
Some officials plunged into the work with gusto.
Adm. Kevin Lunday, the Coast Guard’s new acting commandant, declared Tuesday night that he had directed his operational commanders to “immediately surge” cutters, aircraft, boats and Special Forces to the U.S. maritime borders. He said he sought to block Haitian and Cuban migration by sea from the southeast, patrol the seas around Alaska and to support border agents in the “Gulf of America.”
Lunday was referring to the Gulf of Mexico. Trump on Monday signed an executive order giving the interior secretary 30 days to rename the area the Gulf of America.
“Together, in coordination with our Department of Homeland Security and Department of Defense teammates, we will detect, deter and interdict illegal migration, drug smuggling and other terrorist or hostile activity before it reaches our border,” Lunday said in a statement.
Also, the Justice Department ordered a federal contractor to halt programs that offered free legal guidance to immigrants facing deportation, including detained adults, families and children, according to the contractor, the Acacia Center for Justice, a Washington-based nonprofit.
Immigrants aren’t entitled to public defenders in immigration court. One of the halted programs provided legal representation to unaccompanied children released from U.S. custody. A spokeswoman for DOJ’s immigration courts declined to comment.
Trump’s top policy adviser, Stephen Miller, huddled with Senate Republicans on Wednesday about the military deployment and the urgent need to expand immigration detention, according to Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-North Dakota). Cramer said the goal of sending troops is to achieve “100 percent” operational control of the border.
Lawmakers have expressed frustration about the number of “got-aways” in recent years, referring to people who have crossed illegally without being apprehended. “We don’t just sort of accept a certain number of got-aways,” Cramer said.
House Republicans said last year that there were 2 million “got-aways” under Biden. Homeland Security officials said last week that it had reduced the estimated number about 60 percent from fiscal 2023 to 2024. CBP got-away estimates are based on the number of crossing migrants detected by its sensors and surveillance cameras who are not taken into custody.
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