A new contingent of troops of around 3,000 US -soldiers will arrive along the border with Mexico in the coming weeks.
The Pentagon is sending around 3,000 additional soldiers in active duty to the border between the United States and Mexico, while President Donald Trump seeks to restrict illegal immigration and fulfill a central promise of his campaign, US officials said on Saturday.
Its Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegesh, has ordered elements of a Stryker Brigade Combat and a general support aviation battalion for the mission, announced the Pentagon. The forces will arrive along the border of almost 3,200 kilometers in the coming weeks.
The declaration of the Department of Defense did not specify the size of the deployment, but officials who spoke on condition of anonymity by not being authorized to discuss the matter publicly estimated at around 3,000.
Strykers are personnel transport with middle armor.
Currently, there are approximately 9,200 American soldiers in total on the southern border, including 4,200 deployed under federal orders and around 5,000 soldiers of the National Guard under the control of governors.
The uniformed “will reinforce and expand current border security operations to seal the border and protect the territorial integrity of the United States,” said the Pentagon.
Trump is determined to expand the role of the army in his effort to close the border and send to migrants stopped back to their countries of origin.
Military personnel have been sent to the border almost continuously since the 1990s to help address migration, drug trafficking and transnational crime.