U.S. Soldiers from the Georgia National Guard work alongside U.S. Customs and Border Protection to conduct train inspections in Uvalde, Texas, on February 12, 2025. U.S. ARMY
THE WATCH STAFF
Soldiers from the 10th Mountain Division are among the most recent troops to arrive at the Mexico-United States Southern Border in February 2025. The deployment of troops support the presidential order clarifying the military’s role in protecting the territorial integrity of the United States and to achieve operational control of the 3,145-kilometer border. About 500 Soldiers from the Headquarters and Headquarters Battalion from the Fort Drum, New York-based division have been assigned to U.S. Northern Command (USNORTHCOM) and will constitute a Joint Task Force – Southern Border (JTF-SB) Headquarters, according to a USNORTHCOM news release.
U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said that securing the country’s borders is a top priority to reverse conditions that constitute a national security threat. “Border security is national security, and … we’re going to get 100% operational control of our southern border, and that needs to be and will be a focus of this department,” he said in a Joint Task Force North news release.
The 10th Mountain Division troops packed up their equipment in mid-February and made the long journey south. Elements of the division have already started arriving at Fort Huachuca in southeastern Arizona, about 24 kilometers north of the border, according to a Joint Task Force North Facebook post. Fort Huachuca will serve as the headquarters for the task force. The division is charged with overseeing units from across military services in support of the southern border mission under the direction of USNORTHCOM, which is working in conjunction with the Department of Homeland Security and the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency, according to a division Facebook post. “Units from multiple installations across the Joint Force will fall under the 10th Mountain Division Headquarters and report directly to them, while physically located in various parts of the southern United States,” the post stated.
The January 2025 executive order by President Donald Trump said high rates of illegal migration across the border have led to “widespread chaos and suffering” and trafficking by transnational criminal organizations (TCO) of humans and drugs. Those drugs include fentanyl, the highly potent synthetic opioid that has caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people in the United States. In the last month, about 3,600 active-duty troops, mostly Army Soldiers and Marines, have deployed to the border to assist border patrol agents and strengthen barriers to discourage migrants from attempting to cross illegally. The military has worked closely with U.S. Border Patrol to surveil common transit points and identify criminal activities. Aside from the 10th Mountain Division troops, about 140 intelligence personnel from the Joint Force have been assigned to USNORTHCOM to provide video analysis, counter-network analysis and Spanish language translation to the U.S. Border Patrol Office of Intelligence, according to the USNORTHCOM release.
Encounters with migrants along the border have dropped significantly from a high of nearly 302,000 in December 2023. That month, then-Mexican President Andrès Manuel López Obrador, known as AMLO, agreed to deter migrant caravans and other attempts to reach the U.S, which led to a marked decrease in apprehensions. More recently, AMLO’s successor, Claudía Sheinbaum, has ordered 10,000 Mexican troops to the border.
The number of migrants encountered by U.S. authorities has continued to plummet, totaling just 61,465 encounters in January 2025, according to Customs and Border Protection statistics. Local law enforcement and elected officials in Texas said that an almost complete absence of illegal migrants in recent weeks has allowed them to focus on basic law enforcement. Shelters and other services provided to migrants in recent years are mostly empty, the Washington Post newspaper reported.
In recent remarks to the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee, Gen. Gregory M. Guillot, commander of USNORTHCOM and North American Aerospace Defense Command, said his staff is preparing an assessment and detailed contingency plan to provide “steady-state border security” along the southern border. “USNORTHCOM’s priority is to meet the requirement and intent of these directives, and the command’s actions and plans reflect the urgency associated with the President’s emergency declaration,” Guillot said at the February 2025 hearing.