Biden administration sending 800 new troops to border amid migrant crisis

The Biden administration announced Wednesday that it would deploy an additional 800 troops to assist in stemming the migration influx at the southern border.

The 800 active-duty personnel will focus on “logistics and other functions at the border to allow more Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents and officers to return to their core mission and responsibilities.”

The Department of Defense has already deployed 2,500 state National Guard personnel to assist the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) at the southern border. An additional 24,000 CBP agents and officers are deployed to the border, along with 2,600 nonuniformed officers, according to the White House. 

The announcement comes amid a series of new steps the administration launched to help curb an increase in migration at the southern border in July and likely August.

The number of border encounters had fallen in the month of June, following the expiration of Title 42 — the controversial pandemic-era policy that allowed border patrol agents to turn away migrants at the border, citing health concerns. 

The Biden administration had paired the lifting of the public health emergency — and the end of Title 42 — with new policies that cracked down on asylum-seeking procedures while also creating new mechanisms to schedule appointments with border patrol agents in advance, in order to be able to process the claims in a more orderly fashion. Those policies now face mounting legal challenges from opponents on both sides of the political spectrum. 

On Wednesday, the Biden administration announced several steps it was taking to address migration, including extending Temporary Protective Status (TPS) to nearly half a million Venezuelans who currently in the United States.