The US establishes a new military zone along its border with Mexico.
The U.S. military has just established a second military zone along the border with Mexico, expanding from an area in Texas where soldiers can detain migrants or those illegally entering the country. A similar zone was established in New Mexico last month.
President Donald Trump launched a campaign to tighten immigration controls from the moment he took office, increasing troop numbers at the southern border and pledging to deport millions of undocumented immigrants living in the United States.
In April, the Trump administration announced it had established a 440-kilometer-long area along the New Mexico state border called a “National Defense Zone.”
On the evening of May 1st, the US military announced the establishment of the "Texas National Defense Zone," stretching over 100 kilometers along the Texas-New Mexico border east of El Paso.
The U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) retains jurisdiction over illegal border crossings in this area. Soldiers will hand over migrants they detain to the U.S. Border Patrol or other civilian law enforcement agencies.
According to the U.S. Attorney's Office, 82 migrants have been prosecuted so far for crossing the border into a military zone in New Mexico. The U.S. military has never directly apprehended any of them; all cases have been handled by CBP (Customs Border Protection).
The establishment of these military zones was intended to allow the Trump administration to use troops to detain migrants without invoking the Insurrection Act of 1807 – a law that allows the president to deploy the military to quell civil unrest.
There are currently about 11,900 U.S. troops stationed at the border. The number of migrants apprehended for illegal border crossings in March fell to a record low, according to government data.
Texas Governor Greg Abbott, a Republican, posted an image on Thursday showing the installation of barbed wire fences, along with a statement: "Texas continues to work with the Trump administration to stop illegal immigration."
Meanwhile, New Mexico Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham has opposed what she calls "deportation buffer zones," and in a social media post in March, she called them "a waste of military resources and manpower."
The office of New Mexico Senator Martin Heinrich said on May 2 that the buffer zone is several kilometers wide in some places, raising concerns that civilians could inadvertently enter the area.
“This area is much larger than the 18-meter-wide strip of land known as the Roosevelt Reservation,” Heinrich’s spokesperson, Caty Payette, told Source NM, referring to a strip of federal land that runs along the U.S.-Mexico border.
