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It was the rally cry of President Trump, Fox News and Republicans for weeks heading into the midterm election. An “invasion” of people on their way to steal everything you had. But it turns out, as critics claimed, it was all just campaign propaganda.

The Pentagon has announced that it started withdrawing some active duty service members at the U.S.-Mexico border, with 400 to 500 to be home before Christmas.

“Some units have completed their mission and they have already started to partially redeploy. Other units have been identified to rotate home and will be returning home over the next several weeks,” Army Col. Rob Manning told reporters at the Pentagon.

Manning said that 5,200 service members currently remain at the southern border, down from its peak of about 5,900 service members.

For taxpayers, using thousands of military troops at the border as a campaign prop will cost an estimated $300 million.

Three critics with military and national security experience – Gordon Adams, Lawrence Wilkerson and Isaiah Wilson III – wrote in the New York Times: “The president used America’s military forces not against any real threat but as toy soldiers, with the intent of manipulating a domestic midterm election outcome, an unprecedented use of the military by a sitting president.”

Norman Ornstein, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute thinktank in Washington, tweeted: “Troops at border starting to withdraw. Proving again that this was a blatant misuse of our military and tax dollars for partisan political purposes by Trump.”

Fearmongering has consistently been one of Trump’s favorite ways to rile up his base on immigration. He spoke and tweeted about the pending “invasion” dozens of times before the election.

The Associated Press on Monday reported that about 2,200 of the active duty service members will be pulled from the border before the holidays.

The U.S. forces are not there to directly interact with the immigrants and instead have spent their time stringing up miles of razor wire and providing transportation and protection to CBP agents.

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