The Department of Homeland Security has requested 20,000 National Guard troops to assist its efforts to secure the southern U.S. border, a move the media has declared “unprecedented.”
It’s not.
In 1916, after Pancho Villa’s deadly raid on Columbus, New Mexico, President Woodrow Wilson mobilized nearly 110,000 National Guard troops to the southern border. Their mission was clear: repel cross-border incursions, restore order, and secure the American homeland.
Four decades later, President Dwight D. Eisenhower faced a different threat — a mass illegal migration crisis, following the Bracero Program’s collapse, that was undermining American labor markets and the rule of law. Eisenhower launched a nationwide deportation campaign, but when the time came to request military assistance, the Department of Defense refused. The mission, generals claimed, was too politically sensitive, too diplomatically risky, and too logistically overwhelming.
Today, the United States faces an even greater threat — a weaponized, transnational mass migration crisis engineered by cartels, hostile foreign governments, and ideologically driven bureaucrats.
And once again, the military is being asked to step up. This time, under a renewed commitment from the Trump administration, states such as Florida are no longer waiting for permission. They are acting to enforce the law, protect their people, and fulfill the constitutional duty the federal government has previously abandoned.
Over the past four years, nearly 10 million illegal immigrants from over 170 countries have poured across our borders. These mass movements, often facilitated by cartels and funded by NGOs with ties to open borders ideologues, have overwhelmed the capacity of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, strained local law enforcement, and created a humanitarian and security crisis that now extends deep into the interior of our country.
The result? A national security crisis spanning every state.
The numbers are staggering, but worse is what lies beneath them. According to ICE’s July 2024 report, more than 650,000 criminal illegal immigrants are roaming free on the agency’s Non-Detained Docket. That includes nearly 15,000 individuals convicted of or charged with homicide, over 20,000 sexual predators, and thousands more guilty of assault, weapons violations, kidnapping, and trafficking. The agency simply lacks the manpower to respond. ICE has a little more than 6,000 Enforcement and Removal Operations officers and enforcement removal assistants nationwide. In sanctuary cities, those officers are facing lawfare designed to grind enforcement to a halt.
This has opened the door to something far more dangerous than economic migration: infiltration by foreign adversaries and transnational criminal syndicates. The Biden administration’s “safe, orderly, and humane” parole program became a Trojan Horse, an extralegal system that bypassed immigration law in favor of open borders ideology.
And the consequences are national in scope: cartel foot soldiers, Tren de Aragua enforcers, Chinese Communist Party operatives, and foreign nationals from designated terrorist havens have crossed our borders under the cover of this mass movement. Their whereabouts remain unknown. Their objectives are not.
This isn’t immigration. This is an invasion.
Recognizing that this existential threat has outgrown DHS’s capacity to conduct immigration enforcement, the Trump administration has taken decisive action. On April 11, President Donald Trump issued a National Security Presidential Memorandum titled “Military Mission for Sealing the Southern Border and Repelling Invasions.”
This followed the Jan. 23 “Mass Influx of Aliens” declaration by the Department of Homeland Security, authorizing state and local officers to perform immigration enforcement functions. The measure empowers state law enforcement to exercise “any of the powers or duties conferred on ICE officers” in times of emergency. This is that time.
Those 20,000 National Guard troops that DHS requested are needed to support overwhelmed immigration enforcement operations. Let that sink in. The Department of Homeland Security has publicly acknowledged that the federal system is failing so severely that it needs an Army Corps-sized military deployment to carry out its basic functions.
DESANTIS ASKS TRUMP ADMINISTRATION TO ALLOW FLORIDA NATIONAL GUARDSMEN TO BE IMMIGRATION JUDGES
For the first time since 1916, the U.S. military has been ordered to seal the southern border and restore national security.
Pancho Villa brought rifles. Today’s invaders bring satellite phones and CCP-facilitated fentanyl. But the constitutional principle remains the same: defend the people, uphold the law, and protect the homeland.
Ammon Blair is a Senior Fellow for the Texas Public Policy Foundation’s “Secure & Sovereign Texas” Initiative. He has over 10 years of experience as a U.S. Border Patrol Agent, serving in the Rio Grande Valley Sector, one of the busiest and most challenging areas of the southwest border.