Mission Accomplished

Having faithfully fulfilled their duty of helping President Donald Trump pull off an election year stunt to further the narrative of a migrant “invasion,” some of the troops on the U.S.-Mexico border are coming home, the Pentagon said Monday.

The AP reported that about 2,200 active duty troops—or about 42 percent of the current active duty military presence at the border—will be pulled out before the holidays, per a Defense Department press conference today. “Some units have completed their mission and they have already started to partially redeploy,” Army Col. Rob Manning told reporters. “Other units have been identified to rotate home and will be returning home over the next several weeks.”

U.S. officials said that around 3,000 active duty soldiers will remain at the border in Texas, California, and Arizona, as well as roughly 2,300 National Guard troops, which Manning said would remain through September of next year. The soldiers “installed vast amounts of razor wire and provided transportation and protection for the Border Patrol,” the AP reported. Last month, a Congressional report put the cost of the border deployment at about $210 million.

Anyway, now that the midterms are over and this blatantly political move was proven—again—to be an abject farce and a colossal failure, it appears that the federal government is starting to do the dirty work of sweeping it under the rug and hoping everyone just forgets about it. In other words: A job well done.