Excerpt:
Sixty feet. Nearly the length of a bowling lane.
That’s the width of a stretch of federal lands nestled at the U.S. and Mexico border called the Roosevelt Reservation, named for the 26th president who established it to try to limit smuggling in the early 1900s. Nearly 120 years later, President Donald Trump is considering using the strip as a speed trap migrants would have to clear to escape patrols by the U.S. military.
Military.com confirmed with a U.S. official that parts of the land, which stretches across California, Arizona and New Mexico, may be transferred to the Department of Defense under a “pre-decisional” plan waiting to be signed by the commander in chief. The move, as first reported by The Washington Post, would essentially provide legal cover for active-duty service members to apprehend migrants who cross on to what would become Department of Defense property, making it essentially no different than if anyone trespassed onto a U.S. military base.
It would be a way for active-duty troops to avoid violating Posse Comitatus – a federal act that prevents the U.S. military from performing law enforcement activities. While U.S. troops have been deployed to the border before, that law has meant that they have played a supporting role, providing intelligence and infrastructure repair and construction assistance, rather than the direct handcuff-and-detain-migrants role the Trump administration has envisioned.
The change to the Roosevelt Reservation would be the latest in a long line of moves by the administration that represents something of a spaghetti method of using the military to try to speed up deportations, whether it be using service members for transportation, detention or potentially apprehension along the border, while parrying a barrage of lawsuits challenging the legality of deportations that come with minimal legal oversight.
Military.com spoke to current and former senior military officials as well as a range of experts on defense and civil rights policy about the actions taken by the Trump administration to alter how the U.S. handles migrants and undocumented immigrants currently living in the country. The current and former officials requested anonymity in order to discuss military operations.
Some of the policy experts expressed concerns at the vast expenditure of resources and potential use of legal grey areas that are being pushed by the administration, which has tasked the Pentagon with taking over more and more of the responsibility for immigration enforcement.
“Military deployments at the border don’t seem to be connected, at least on this side of the border, with deterring migration,” Danny Woodward, an attorney with the Texas Civil Rights Project, told Military.com. “We are hugely concerned about things we’ve been hearing using military resources for detention and deportation.”
Those responsibilities the military is taking on include expensive and costly deportation flights on military aircraft, something that has traditionally been done by other agencies on commercial airliners. Also, as of Friday, 74 migrants have been shipped to the military’s Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp in Cuba and held in a military-run prison.
That site has historically been used for terrorism suspects, some of whom are tied to the attacks on 9/11, and the military has plans at other bases for additional detention facilities. Cartels have been designated as terrorist organizations, paving the way for American forces to potentially even strike targets in countries allied in fighting drug trafficking.
As of this week, upward of 11,000 troops – more than 6,000 active duty on Title 10 federal orders, as well as nearly 5,000 Guardsmen serving in Texas’ Operation Lone Star – are supporting Trump’s border objectives from units across the country, and many have started making their presence known in small border towns across the southern states.
Included in those numbers is a March 1 federal deployment of thousands of troops and Stryker units, massive eight-wheeled armored vehicles that are set to patrol desert portions of the border. In the Big Bend region of Texas, in the towns of Marfa, Presidio and Alpine, around 500 troops from those units are expected to be in the area, compared to the 10,000 residents.
About time Americans got a taste of the havoc their military has been inflicting on the rest of the world for decades. Dumbasses. Maybe they’ll actually wake up but I won’t hold out hope.
Build a dominant military, get put to the sword by that same military. History is littered with precedent on this. My empathy has worn down to the level of “thoughts and prayers”.
I didn’t build shit. The military industrial complex has been steadily being built over the last 70 years post ww2.
That’s very valid. But the general culture in the US has been to be uncritical about the actions and policies of their military, to always focus on the individuals so they can be thanked for their “service” without realising how weird and dangerous that is. Now the lessons learned overseas are being applied in the homeland.
Yeah, it’s a carefully crafted culture curated by the media and politicians.
How is this going to affect US citizens, are they illegally crossing the border?
We have already seen this administration, and state and local agencies, discard the concept of due process - legal, natural born US citizens have been caught up in the net already just because they look “foreign”. Indeed, the military itself disregarded due process habitually in Iraq and Afghanistan as they were unquestioned.
So who is a US Citizen? A person requires due process to prove their citizenship. Can you trust Trumpworld to ask questions before they shoot? How do you mount a defense without due process?
We have seen before how mission creep hands ever greater powers to the state. Originally, searches of property were conducted at border crossings. Then searches included devices such as smartphones and the content of those phones including social media apps. Then the definition of “border” search areas was increased to anywhere within 190 miles of a border or port of entry (eg airports), meaning without a warrant your phone is subject to seizure and data retrieval with zero probable cause if you live near any major city, if the authorities so choose.
So today, the military patrol the border. Tomorrow, the border region, next week any state with a land or sea border, next month any state with an international airport…
I just think this is a stretch from an article that says they may deploy the military at once place on the southern border. I don’t think this article discusses something that is going to give the US a taste of their own medicine; nor do I think the military will start violating habeas corpus willy nilly across the country. Nor do I think they’re going to be conducting airstrikes and launching tomahawks at peoples houses. That’s military havoc.
Maybe an unfortunate lost hiker who happens to stumble into that specific area on the border gets detained, but this potential deployment will not even be seen by an overwhelming majority of people in the US.
The police and ICE are much more relevant threats to any random person in the US, but they’re not military. The military isn’t going to start doing those things in your last paragraph, they’ve got other agencies for that, and they’re already doing what you’re talking about.
And people once thought it was a stretch that your now god king emperor would ever have a chance in hell of being elected.
The days of hyperbole are over.
The worst you can imagine is the most likely outcome.
If people keep saying it’ll never happen and keep doing nothing, it’ll happen.
If these strips of land are deemed military bases, then ANYONE going onto them can be treated as if they have trespassed onto a military base. That includes US citizens.
