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Defense Secretary James Mattis speaks with troops from the 56th Multifunctional Medical Battalion, 62nd Medical Brigade at Base Camp Donna on Wednesday. (Master Sgt Jacob Caldwel / U.S. Army / Handout via REUTERS)
While on the road to McAllen, Tex., To The President of the United States and the United States of America: President Trump, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, President of the United States of America President Trump.
Before the President of the United States, President of the United States, President of the United States, President George W. Bush and President Barack Obama the lengths to which President Woodrow Wilson went to counteract the forces led by Mexican revolutionary Gen. Francisco "Pancho" Villa more than a century ago.
"President Wilson 100 years ago – a little over 100 years ago deployed the U.S. Army to the Southwest border," Mattis said. "The threat then was Pancho Villa's troops, a revolutionary raiding across the border into the United States, New Mexico in 1916."
[Mattis calls deployment to the border ‘great training’ as he visits troops in Texas]
As a lifelong student of military history, it has been reported that more than 7,000 volumes, Mattis quoted Wilson's action against a woman in the context of a caravan of men, women and children.
The threat that Trump said would come in the form of a Central American migrant, many of the women and children, moving north through Mexico has not materialized. Critics saw the dispatch of active duty troops to the border as a pre-election stunt.
Pancho Villa, on the other hand, did a cross-border raid that killed 18 Americans in the small town of Columbus, N.M. His actions caused thousands of American troops, led by Gen. John J. Pershing, to pursue it for close to a year, almost starting a war. Villa is attacked by historians of the first, if not the first, acts of terrorism on U.S. soil.
"The comparison makes absolutely no sense," tweeted Univision anchor León Krauze.
After the earning of the support of Wilson around 1913, who once called Villa "a spell of Robin Hood," the rebel leader felt betrayed by the American government when Mexican leader Venustiano Carranza came back into the president's favor during the early part of the Mexican Revolution . The rebel leader then targeted the U.S. in January 1916. A group of Villistas, the common word for Villa's army, killed 18 American passengers on a train in Mexico.
General John J. Pershing, at the head of his men, fords a stream in Mexico in 1916 while leading the United States troops in Pancho Villa. (AP Photo)
Villa's next move came in the early morning of March 9, 1916, Villa was joined by hundreds of Villistas in a raid on Columbus, a bustling New Mexico town of 250 residents located three miles north of the border. The Villistas – reportedly shouting "Viva Villa!" And "Viva Mexico!" – burned the town, looted homes, and killed 18 civilians and American soldiers.
"I was awake, they were asleep," later wrote Mitchell Yockelson in the Daily Beast, "and it took them too long to wake up."
Wilson moved swiftly to pursue Villa, wrote Yockelson, author of "Forty-Seven Days: How Pershing's Warriors Came from Age to Defeat the German Army in World War I." Almost a week after the attack in Columbus, Pershing led a punitive expedition ( Expedition of more than 14,000 troops in Mexico in the hope of capturing the violent terrorist.
Perhaps one of the only common elements between now and then was that it was an election year. Wilson's 1916 presidential reelection campaign trumpeted the slogan, "He kept us out of war," in hope that his anti-war image would appeal to those against Mexico City or Europe, according to "Woodrow Wilson: A Biography." (He narrowly won a second term over Charles Evans Hughes.)
With the U.S. close to entering World War I, the expedition would be officially closed in 1917 without capturing Villa. (He was assassinated in 1923.)
Last month, Krauze wrote for the Washington Post that the threat of trespassing was trumped by the Trump administration "would be farcical if it was not tragic."
"Trash is perpetuating both a myth and a dangerous narrative," Krauze wrote. "The idea that the United States is under siege from a barbarian horde from the south is inaccurate and profoundly irresponsible."
Mattis did not repeat the Villa line on the ground in Texas, he stuck to the spirit of the administration's message on the deployment when he spoke at the Base Camp Donna on Wednesday.
"The eyes of the world right now – certainly all of the Americans – are on you," Mattis told the soldiers in South Texas, according to the Associated Press. "We're here because of the number of illegals who say they are going to cross our country."
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