Troops sent to the U.S.-Mexico border after Donald Trump warned about the dangers of the Latin American "migrant caravan" are being recalled less than a week after reports emerged that they were incredibly bored while waiting for the caravan to arrive.
Politico reported that Army Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Buchanan, the general overseeing the deployment, confirmed in an interview that troops sent for engineering and logistics will begin coming home.
In interviews with the New York Times, troops deployed to the border described days of building barbed-wire fences and trying to scrounge together amenities to make their makeshift bases more livable.
"When you send a soldier on a dubious mission, with no military value, over Thanksgiving, it doesn’t help morale at all," Rep. Anthony Brown (D-MD), an Iraq War veteran, told the Times.
Buchanan said all the troops should be home by Christmas, and that the military's current "end date" for the mission is December 15.
"Now that things are set down here, we don’t need as many troops to actually build a base camp and things like that, because the base camps are built," the lieutenant general told Politico.