The Trump administration is beginning to hand hundreds of miles of land along the southern border over to the Department of Defense in a novel immigration strategy that would treat the territory as one long military base.
Last week, the Trump administration instructed the Interior Department to start transferring the land, a 60-foot-wide tract that runs through California, Arizona, and New Mexico, to the Pentagon, with a test site established to the east of Fort Huachuca.
The move amounts to a test of the new policy, with the executive order giving the Pentagon 45 days to assess the operation, but should the Trump administration decide to proceed with its plan, it would amount to a dramatic escalation in its attempts to militarize the border.
The White House has already surged troops to assist Border Patrol and started using military aircraft to repatriate migrants early in President Donald Trump’s second term, but the latest proposal could drastically expand troops’ ability to detain illegal border crossers, who would be treated as trespassers if they stepped foot on the military’s land.
Currently, soldiers only have limited authority to help border agents, meaning the executive order could serve as a way to get around what is known as the Posse Comitatus Act.
“At the President’s direction, the DoD and DHS are developing a joint report assessing the conditions at the U.S. southern border and recommending actions to achieve full operational control of the border,” a Pentagon official wrote in an email Tuesday.
Pentagon takes over the ‘Roosevelt Reservation’
The land in question is the first 60 feet north of the border, extending along a stretch roughly 750 miles in length.
In 1907, President Theodore Roosevelt issued a proclamation that established the territory as the Roosevelt Reservation, a way to keep the public land along the border in those three states “free from obstruction as a protection against the smuggling of goods between the United States and Mexico.”
Texas was not initially included in the century-old proclamation because it had maintained control of public land during its annexation.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters on Tuesday afternoon that the administration would soon add land in Texas to extend the military perimeter farther east.
“In the coming weeks, this administration will add more than 90 miles in the state of Texas,” Leavitt said in the White House press briefing. “This national defense area will enhance our ability to detect, interdict, and prosecute illegal aliens, criminal gangs, and terrorists who were able to invade our country without consequence for the past four years under the Biden administration.”
Shifting which federal department controls the land is not unprecedented for Trump. In 2019, his first administration moved to transfer land controlled by the Interior Department to the Defense Department for three years so that it could build 70 miles of border wall in that area.
What’s changing?
In the first 100 days of Trump’s second term, the military has had its responsibilities shifted to meet an even more aggressive stance on border crossings. The military has helped deport illegal immigrants in federal custody to other countries, overseen a mostly empty immigrant detention center at Guantanamo Bay, and been tasked with building detention facilities on U.S. soil, including El Paso, Texas’s Fort Bliss.
The Pentagon has deployed 7,100 active-duty troops under Trump, with another 4,600 National Guard soldiers who are under state control. However, they are limited in job scope given the Posse Comitatus Act, which prevents the military from conducting civilian law enforcement.
In the next month and a half, the DOD will begin by taking over a portion of the Roosevelt Reservation in New Mexico, not far from the Army’s Fort Huachuca, according to the Associated Press, which previewed the setup details.
The next step is having soldiers in New Mexico install fencing and signage that warns would-be crossers not to trespass on that land.
Any person caught trespassing may be arrested by the military installation’s security. The soldiers would then turn the trespasser over to local police, not federal Border Patrol agents, because the violator is in custody for a nonimmigration offense.
The Pentagon has not disclosed if it will send additional troops to the border to assist with its pilot program in New Mexico.
Getting around Posse Comitatus
Trump’s executive order is aimed at getting around the Posse Comitatus Act by citing an exception known as the “military purpose doctrine.” If the military’s presence is primarily for a military purpose rather than for law enforcement, it would, in theory, not be in violation of the act and could arrest trespassers.
In this case, the military would be standing feet from the border for the purpose of guarding the Roosevelt Reservation.
Elizabeth Goitein, senior director of the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law, called that rationale legally dubious and an “abuse of emergency powers” by the Trump administration, arguing in a series of posts on X that the apprehensions must be “incidental” and not the primary purpose of the military site.
WHITE HOUSE EYES 1 MILLION DEPORTATIONS — BUT HITTING THAT NUMBER WON’T BE EASY
“It is high time Congress and the courts put an end to all of these power grabs. Immigration laws can and should be enforced through lawful means, without abusing emergency powers, misappropriating wartime authorities, or trying to skirt the Posse Comitatus Act,” she said.
The White House did not respond to a request for comment but has previously defended its immigration policies as necessary to counter the drug cartels and human smuggling along the border.
