The Pentagon will begin deploying as many as 1,500 active duty troops to help secure the southern border in the coming days, U.S. officials said Wednesday, putting in motion plans President Donald Trump laid out in executive orders shortly after he took office to crack down on immigration. Acting Defense Secretary Robert Salesses was expected to sign the deployment orders on Wednesday, but it wasn’t yet clear which troops or units will go, and the total could fluctuate. It remains to be seen if they will end up doing law enforcement, which would put American troops in a dramatically different role for the first time in decades. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because the announcement has not yet been made. The active duty forces would join the roughly 2,500 U.S. National Guard and Reserve forces already there. There are currently no active duty troops working along the roughly 2,000-mile border. The troops are expected to be used to support Border Patrol agents, with logistics, transportation and construction of barriers. They have done similar duties in the past, when both Trump and former President Joe Biden sent active duty troops to the border. Troops are prohibited by law from doing law enforcement duties under the Posse Comitatus Act, but that may change. Trump has directed through executive order that the incoming secretary of defense and incoming homeland security chief report back within 90 days if they think an 1807 law called the Insurrection Act should be invoked. That would allow those troops to be used in civilian law enforcement on U.S. soil. The last time the act was invoked was in 1992 during rioting in Los Angeles in protest of the acquittal of four police officers charged with beating Rodney King. The widely expected deployment, coming in Trump’s first week in office, was an early step in his long-touted plan to expand the use of the military along the border. In one of his first orders on Monday, Trump directed the defense secretary to come up with a plan to “seal the borders” and repel “unlawful mass migration.” On Tuesday, just as Trump fired the Coast Guard commandant, Adm. Linda Fagan, the service announced it was surging more cutter ships, aircraft and personnel to the “Gulf of America” — a nod to the president’s directive to rename the Gulf of Mexico. Trump said during his inaugural address on Monday that “I will declare a national emergency at our southern border. All illegal entry will immediately be halted, and we will begin the process of returning millions and millions of criminal aliens back to the places in which they came.” Military personnel have been sent to the border almost continuously since the 1990s to help address migration. drug trafficking and transnational crime. In executive orders signed Monday, Trump suggested the military would help the Department of Homeland Security with “detention space, transportation (including aircraft), and other logistics services.” There are about 20,000 Border Patrol agents, and while the southern border is where most are located, they’re also responsible for protecting the northern border with Canada. Usually agents are tasked with looking for drug smugglers or people trying to enter the country undetected. More recently, however, they have had to deal with migrants actively seeking out Border Patrol in order to […]