National Security Adviser John Bolton championed a plan to send U.S. troops to the southern border to keep migrants out, after rejecting a proposal by Homeland Security to employ the UN refugee agency to set up migrant camps in Mexico, senior administration officials tell The Daily Beast.
Bolton shared plans directly with a like-minded Donald Trump, cutting out the president’s chief of staff and the head of Homeland Security, two senior administration officials tell The Daily Beast.
“Senior officials in the administration are concerned that the president is frustrated that we don’t have a viable solution at the border,” a third official said, in defense of Bolton.
Two of the officials say Bolton was pushing the president to seal the border with the military last week, and sharing few details with the White House officials or cabinet secretaries, saying he would only convey the information to a tiny circle of people including Trump. The third official insisted Bolton did not come up with the military plan on his own, but was executing the commander in chief’s wishes, which the president expressed last week in a tweet threatening to “call up the U.S. Military and CLOSE OUR SOUTHERN BORDER!”
