US President Donald Trump said on Wednesday that up to 15,000 troops could be deployed on the US-Mexico border to stop Central American migrants.
With respect to the caravan of migrants, our military is deployed. We have 5,000 and we’re going to go up to 10,000 or 15,000,”
said Trump from the White House grounds.
On October 13th, a caravan of migrants that left San Pedro Sula, Honduras, had a great media impact and caught Trump’s attention. Since then, the US president has addressed the issue almost daily and has promised to curb the migrants, placing this issue at the center of the electoral campaign for the mid-term elections.
The security management in the southern border in general does not involve troops in active service and a contingent of 15 thousand people would be equivalent to the mobilization of the United States in Afghanistan.
It’s a group of dangerous people,”
said Trump less than a week before the November 6th election in which the Republican Party could lose control of the Congress.
The first caravan, made up of about 3,500 people, according to the data of US authorities, advances through the state of Oaxaca, in southern Mexico. A second group of migrants, made up of about 2,000 people, currently walks through Chiapas, the Mexican state bordering Guatemala.
There is also a caravan made up of Salvadorans that left on Sunday and two other groups that with nearly 2,000 people who left this Wednesday from San Salvador. On Wednesday, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) described the current situation as an unprecedented crisis.
However, according to their own data, the number of illegal immigrants intercepted in 2018 was 400 thousand, compared to 1.6 million people in the year 2000.