MEXICO CITY — During his latest presidential campaign, President Donald Trump bragged about compelling Mexico to deploy 28,000 troops to its borders during his first administration to avoid tariffs.

Last week, Trump and Mexico brokered another deal to send an additional 10,000 Mexican National Guard members to the border to stop the flow of migrants and drugs — a compromise to once again stave off U.S. tariffs. Trump has championed the agreement as a victory for the United States.

But analysts and former diplomats who brokered the first troop deployment in 2019 are doubtful that additional soldiers will have much effect thwarting the movement of migrants or drugs, particularly fentanyl.

Instead, they say, the deployment agreed to by President Claudia Sheinbaum of Mexico may be catering to Trump’s affinity for deal-making rather than being part of a well-thought-out military campaign.

‘shock and awe’

“It’s a lot of shock and awe, but very little policy,” said Arturo Sarukhán, Mexico’s ambassador to Washington during President Felipe Calderón’s term from 2006 to 2012, an administration that aggressively pursued cartels inside Mexico, igniting extraordinary levels of violence nationwide.

The Mexican government appears to be echoing Trump’s fondness for a high-profile media blitz with its own.

After the deal was struck, photos and videos of Mexican soldiers waiting to board military flights and vehicles for their border deployment circulated widely. They mirrored Trump’s use of U.S. military planes to deport migrants in recent weeks.

But what the Mexican troops will do on the border is unclear. The Mexican Defense Ministry is known for its lack of transparency, as it is not required to disclose its operations or funding details to Mexico’s congress or the public.

There are clues from Trump’s first term, when more than 20,000 Mexican troops were sent to the country’s northern and southern borders and were responsible for erecting checkpoints and breaking up large groups of migrants.

The Mexican Defense Ministry did not respond to questions about the deployment and Sheinbaum has so far said little about what exactly the force will be responsible for.

Mexico already has a significant military presence along the U.S. border. Sam Storr, an analyst who tracks military activity with the Citizen Security Project at the Ibero-American University in Mexico City, said that there was a monthly average of 1,115 national guard members and 7,959 Mexican army troops as part of immigration enforcement at the country’s northern border in the first half of 2024.

Adding 10,000 new National Guard members, Storr said, could “potentially be a significant increase,” but he also called it “extremely confusing.” He said it was not known if some troops would be rotated out.

And, he said, based on public records requests, it is the Mexican army that has traditionally carried out more drug seizures — and has a larger presence in northern states.

The national guard, Storr said, “seems to be an auxiliary force,” filling gaps for state police.

When it comes to immigration, however, the flow of migrants trying to cross into the United States is now a trickle of what it once was, after Mexico stepped up security efforts last year and Joe Biden’s administration enforced restrictions on asylum.

U.S. Border Patrol officials recorded roughly 71,000 illegal crossings at the end of Trump’s first term in December 2020. While crossings hit record highs under President Joe Biden in 2023, they dropped to about 47,000 by December 2024.

The bigger question is what additional troops can do, if anything, to stanch the flow of fentanyl into the United States.

“It’s Whac-a-Mole,” Sarukhan said. “Most of the fentanyl goes through legal points of entry into the U.S., not between them, and that’s where most troops will be deployed: at illegal points of entry.”

Threefold challenge

The challenge of fentanyl interception, analysts say, is threefold. First, fentanyl is compact, with only small quantities of the drug needed to get a lot of people high. It is much easier to smuggle into the United States in personal vehicles compared with other drugs. Mexican security forces do not search vehicles at U.S. ports of entry; that happens on the American side of the border.

Second, a majority of fentanyl smugglers are not illegal migrants, as Trump claims, but U.S. citizens going through border crossings.

In 2023, U.S. citizens were responsible for 86% of fentanyl trafficking cases in the United States, according to government figures.

Third, although the national guard is authorized to carry out inspections, significantly more soldiers would be required to effectively inspect the volume of vehicles, which would likely slow down bilateral trade between the United States and Mexico.