Inside Trump’s Failed Plan to Surveil the Canadian Border

Exclusive: Inside Trump’s Failed Plan to Surveil the Canadian Border

The US/Canadian border, often described as the oldest demilitarized border in world history, has historically been free of a military presence from either nation.  That might change under President Trump.

In late March, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) requested $145 million in US military support to surveil the US-Canada border, according to a leaked internal Pentagon memo obtained by Nation DC correspondent Ken Klippenstein. Their request was rebuffed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff who feared opposition from the Canadians.

Chrystia Freeland, the deputy prime minister of Canada, expressed outrage at the proposal, telling The Nation: “Militarization runs against almost everything institutional in Canadian foreign and domestic policy going back the last 20 years, and I don’t say that lightly.”

While Trump has repeatedly accused foreigners of spreading diseases and demanded that Covid-19 be called a “Chinese” virus, he has not publicly targeted Canadians—yet. The Nation previously reported on a separate March memo showing that CBP requested more than 1,500 additional military personnel for border enforcement, citing immigrants’ “potential to spread infectious disease,” despite the fact that there were and are infinitely more documented cases of coronavirus in the United States than north or south of our borders.

Read the full story here.

KJ