The White House and its guardians of whiteness are freaked out about the caravan of migrants coming up through Mexico to the point that they’re sending troops to guard the border.

Fixated on the migrant caravan moving north through Mexico, President Trump is weighing a plan to shut the U.S. border to Central Americans and deny them the opportunity to seek asylum, asserting similar emergency powers used during the early 2017 “travel ban,” according to administration officials and people familiar with the proposal.

The White House is also preparing to deploy as many as 1,000 additional U.S. troops to assist in security operations at the southern border in anticipation of the caravan’s arrival, officials said.

[…]

The migrant caravan remains more than 900 miles from U.S. territory and has dwindled to about 3,000 people, according to the latest estimates from Mexican authorities. But the scenes of young men breaking through gates along the Guatemala-Mexico border earlier this week have alarmed the White House, and Trump continues to depict the Central American migrant group as a criminal menace and a security threat.

Impoverished families, many of whom are traveling with children and surviving on handouts, comprise the bulk of those advancing slowly through southern Mexico.

The Trump administration has provided no evidence that Middle Easterners and dangerous criminals are mixed in.

Since hey’re traveling at a rate of about 20 miles a day, they will be at the U.S. border sometime around the middle of January, assuming they maintain their course and speed.  That makes the Okies in “The Grapes of Wrath” sound like they were flying to California on business class.

The message that’s apparently not getting through to anyone in authority is that these are desperately poor and tired people willing to sacrifice everything they have to get to the border to ask for asylum.  By the time they get here they’ll be so worn out and depleted that even if any of them had criminal intent, it will have been replaced by the basic instinct to survive, and it’s highly unlikely they’re going to mastermind some horrific plot to invade Brownsville.

But Trump and his racist and xenophobic allies are so twitterepated about a harmless group of poor people that they’re trying to send the Army to defend the border against… what?  There have been bigger crowds at Tiger Stadium waiting to take a piss during the seven-inning stretch.  Not only that, because of the Posse Comitatus law, the only thing the military can do is provide support to local law enforcement; they cannot themselves enforce the law.  So it would be a lot cheaper — and a lot more efficient — to get the Red Cross to come in and set up shelters and Porta-Potties to greet the caravan.  But nothing says Trump America more than welcoming asylum seekers with a machine gun nest.

By the time they get here, the election will be long past, the new – hopefully Democratic and therefore sane — House will have been sworn in, this crisis will have faded from the headlines, and Trump will have found another shiny object to obsess over.  Meanwhile, the situation that created the caravan in the first place — the horrific conditions in places like Honduras and the neglect by our quivering bully of an administration — will still be in place.  Everything is being done to send the migrants back, but nothing has been done to help them when they get here.