By American Renaissance | Created at 2025-04-02 22:58:47 | Updated at 2025-04-04 02:52:10
1 day ago
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.
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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.
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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.
But it’s unclear what those soldiers, Marines and Guardsmen’s daily lives and operations will look like in the desert, especially as border crossings have dropped to historic lows in Trump’s first months in office.
In late February, the Department of Homeland Security announced only 200 apprehensions in a single day at the border — marking the lowest in 15 years. While crossings did spike under former President Joe Biden’s administration, actions taken later in his presidency began turning the trend downward ahead of Trump’s inauguration.
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After Trump’s executive actions and renewed rhetoric regarding the southern border, the military was initially tasked with providing some deportation flights. The flights were quickly caught up in litigation over the administration’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act of 1798. In one prominent case, Trump administration officials have refused to provide details of the deportations to a judge by claiming the state secrets privilege — a mechanism to avoid judicial scrutiny often designed for matters of major national security concern.
Photos of C-17 Globemaster IIIs and C-130 Hercules transporting migrants to Guantanamo Bay and other countries have been plastered on social media by administration-connected accounts, but the U.S. Air Force wouldn’t disclose which units the planes and pilots were coming from and even advised crews and armed security forces aboard the flights, as Military.com reported, to hide name tapes and other identifiers on their uniforms.
Flight trackers and watchdogs have pointed out that the military’s flights are expensive, inefficient and, ultimately, are leading to fewer migrants being transported under the Trump administration’s widespread push to remove people from American soil than typical through traditional commercial flights.
Thomas Cartwright, a deportation flight tracker with the advocacy group Witness at the Border, said that the military has done 33 deportation stops among 26 flight routers since late January, per his data collection.
But that number has trailed off, he added. In late January, there were eight flights. By February, a total of 19. As March comes to a close, there have been only six deportation flights in total and none to Guantanamo Bay since March 1.
Most recently, there were military deportation flights on March 20 and on Friday, a U.S. official confirmed.
“They’re not doing more deportation flights than they were under Biden, and certainly not doing more than peak times in the past,” Cartwright told Military.com. “They just want to basically strengthen their position that we’re under an invasion by having this kind of theatrical use of the military. It’s a very, very expensive public relations campaign, in my view.”
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has acknowledged the optics on Fox News, saying “the message is clear: If you break the law, if you’re a criminal, you could find your way at Guantanamo Bay.”
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The array of units being sent to the southern border is wide-ranging, from Marine Corps combat engineer battalions from Camp Pendleton in California putting up concertina wire to the Army‘s 2nd Stryker Brigade Combat Team from Fort Carson, Colorado, driving their vehicles to survey and transport border agents.
In the small West Texas towns of Presidio, Alpine and Marfa, the Strykers’ and troops’ presence has already been broadcast. With 500 troops planned to arrive, it would mark a huge influx of people to the area. Marfa, for example, is home to only about 1,600 residents.
Army officials told local reporters during a press conference last week that troops will be operating along the border within Big Bend National Park, Marfa Public Radio reported. Additionally, reports from the local Big Bend Sentinel newspaper detailed that encampments within the park as well as the nearby Marfa and Presidio airports have been discussed as possibilities. Notably, there’s limited housing in the region to accommodate such a large number of people.
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The continued march toward military participation in the immigration system is moving fast.
On Friday, Hegseth signed a package authorizing the Army to assume control and management of Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement contracts for construction, maintenance and upkeep of the existing processing center at Fort Bliss in El Paso, Texas, a U.S. official told Military.com. Additionally, the secretary approved the use of Army land near the facility for new construction.
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