The Trump administration proposed the unprecedented deployment of 250,000 military personnel to the border to cut off immigrants

The government of former President Donald Trump considered sending up to

to stop the arrival of immigrants, and also wanted to launch military operations in the neighboring country against drug cartels, as revealed this Wednesday by The New York Times newspaper.

This plan would have mobilized more than half of the active Army, becoming the largest use of the military within the country since the Civil War and a

at the height of the 20 years of conflict in the Asian country.

During the past fiscal year (from October 2020 to September 2021), more than 1.7 million immigrants were intercepted at the border, the historical record since the records began in the 1980s, according to the newspaper The Washington. Post from unpublished figures from Customs and Border Protection (CBP).

Trump during a visit to an unfinished section of the border wall in Pharr, Texas, on June 30, 2021.Eric Gay / AP

The Trump administration's proposal to deploy the Army was discussed between the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Defense, according to the aforementioned newspaper.

The president's then-chief adviser and architect of his immigration policies, Stephen Miller, had urged immigration authorities to send troops to the border and seal it using the COVID-19 pandemic as an excuse.

[The Government promises: "No ICE agent will pick up people when they go to work or on the way to school"]

The plan was sent to the military of the Northern Command, responsible for military operations in the country and on its borders, according to several former high-level officials to the aforementioned media;

It was never formally presented to Trump for approval but did appear at White House meetings.

Upon learning of the plan in spring 2020, former Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper was enraged at Miller and security officials for not consulting with him before proposing it to Northern Command.

After a confrontation with Miller in the Oval Office,

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Oct. 15, 202100: 35

At that time, in March 2020, the Government was already about to implement the measure known as Title 42, which allows denying the right of asylum to the vast majority of migrants due to the risk of transmission of the coronavirus.

At the time, Trump also pressured his top aides to

.

The ex-president did not think it was a bad idea but he gave up when his aides reminded him that this could seem like a declaration of war by the United States to his largest trading partner.

Although Esper did not want to comment to the aforementioned outlet about his role in dismantling Trump's plans, in a few months he will publish a book on the Trump White House.