The Pentagon said on Wednesday that it would send 1,500 active-duty troops to the southwestern border by the end of the month, the vanguard of what military officials described as a rapidly evolving, high-priority mission that could ultimately number several thousand forces.
A senior Defense Department official said 1,000 Army soldiers and 500 Marines, as well as additional intelligence analysts and helicopters and their crews, were being rushed to the border to begin fulfilling one of President Trump’s top policy priorities: stemming the flow of migrants into the United States.
The first few hundred troops started moving toward the border on Wednesday morning, Pentagon officials said. They include Marines who had been on call to help support firefighting efforts in Southern California until they were released from that duty over the weekend as the blazes eased.
Among the troops’ first missions will be to help build “temporary and permanent physical barriers to add additional security to curtail illegal border crossings and illicit trafficking,” Robert G. Salesses, the acting defense secretary, said in a statement.
The new troops will join 2,500 Army Reserve and National Guard soldiers whom the Biden administration had already called to active duty to support federal law enforcement officials. Their missions have included detection and monitoring, data entry, training, transportation and maintenance.
A senior military official, speaking to reporters at a briefing Wednesday afternoon, said the 4,000 troops will now carry out some of the same tasks as before but also conduct some new missions, such as helping build the border barriers.
The military official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss operational details, said there were no orders as of yet to help build detention centers or carry out law enforcement duties.
The military official did not rule out whether the troops would be armed — as some have been in the past on these kinds of missions — and said that determination would be made by ground commanders depending on the threat.
The deployment announced will be just the first of several major troop movements to the southern border in the coming days, officials said.
“This is just the beginning,” Mr. Salesses said in his statement. “In short order, the department will develop and execute additional missions in cooperation” with several and federal agencies.
In addition to the ground troops, the Pentagon said that it would provide military aircraft to support Department of Homeland Security flights of more than 5,000 undocumented migrants from areas near San Diego and El Paso.
Mr. Trump on Monday signed an executive order that gave the military an explicit role in immigration enforcement. It also directed the Defense Department to come up with a plan “to seal the borders and maintain the sovereignty, territorial integrity and security of the United States by repelling forms of invasion.”
The directive is likely to clash with the Posse Comitatus Act, an 1878 law that forbids the use of armed forces for law enforcement purposes on U.S. soil unless Congress or the Constitution expressly authorizes it.
Some legal analysts viewed the order even more ominously, saying it directed the military to treat the border not as a law enforcement matter but as a full-scale military campaign. Indeed, the order directs the military’s Northern Command, which oversees homeland defense, to prepare options within 30 days on how to execute the mission.
Wednesday’s troop deployment, reported earlier by Fox News, comes even as the current state of the border is fairly calm, with crossings having fallen sharply in recent months after the Biden administration took major steps to limit migration.
Mr. Trump ordered active-duty troops to the border in his first term, but Pentagon and White House officials said the current planning will ultimately dwarf that operation in size and scope.
In October 2018, Mr. Trump ordered more than 5,000 active-duty military troops to deploy to the southern border, an escalation of a midterm election show of force against a caravan of Central American migrants that the president characterized as an “invasion of our country.”
The active-duty troops at that time included engineers who could help erect physical barriers. There were also helicopter and plane units to transport Border Patrol agents, medical support personnel and planning teams to help coordinate the influx of forces.
The troops were armed and operated under the same legal authorities as the National Guard troops already on the border.
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