President Donald Trump on Friday signed a new executive order authorizing the U.S. military to take control of parts of a federal strip of land along the U.S.-Mexico border known as the Roosevelt Reservation, giving the Department of Defense new powers to operate directly on the international line.
The Roosevelt Reservation is a 60-foot-wide strip that runs along the southern edge of California, Arizona and New Mexico. It does not extend into Texas, where most land along the border is privately owned.
U.S. military personnel are not allowed to participate in domestic law enforcement on American soil. But if land around the border were designated as an army base, for example, they’d be authorized to detain people trespassing, and turn them over to local authorities.
Pablo De La Rosa, a journalist based in the Rio Grande Valley who covered this topic for his newsletter, Across the Americas, said this strip of land allows the federal government to enact immigration enforcement policies.
“It allows the Department of Defense to build border barriers, install surveillance systems, and establish what are called national defense areas,” he said. “And the key there is that it gives the Department of Defense a military-style jurisdiction on those lands.”
Texas does not have a piece of the Roosevelt Reservation because private property ownership tends to extend all the way to the border. However, De La Rosa said the move to militarize the Roosevelt Reservation is very similar to what Gov. Greg Abbott has already done in Texas with Operation Lone Star.
“All these moves on the border across the country are very similar to what we saw with Operation Lone Star here,” he said. “I know some Texas listeners may have already heard Governor Abbott call OLS the blueprint for the Trump administration once or twice. And we’ve seen it unroll step by step in a very similar way.”
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Critics of Trump’s immigration policy have expressed frustration with the use of an executive order to respond to what the administration calls “an invasion” of people coming across the border.
“That invasion declaration has to do with a claim that immigrants are coming across the border,” De La Rosa said. “Critics rightly point to the fact that crossings at the moment are the lowest they’ve been, some of the numbers have been the lowest in history, actually. So that’s not really happening.
“A lot of groups, including human rights groups, have criticized this move as sort of a weaponization of constitutional wartime powers to what is fundamentally sort of a humanitarian situation. And they’re saying that it subverts refugee protection and sort of misuses the military against these vulnerable people who are seeking safety.”
The military’s new control over parts of the Roosevelt Reservation also goes along with the 10,000 troops Trump announced would deploy to the border.
“I believe there’s about 6 to 7,000 there already,” De La Rosa said. “On Tuesday, they announced that at least 90 miles of the Texas border will come under military jurisdiction as a result of this executive order over the next few weeks. The specific location is not clear. But again, we may see maybe there were those remaining 2 or 3,000 troops here or some portion of them shortly.”
How this change to the military’s presence along the border will impact U.S. relations with Mexico remains to be seen, De La Rosa said.
“I know that the Texas Public Policy Foundation has put out at least one major recommendation for really aggressive diplomacy with Mexico that talks about some kind of military action,” he said. “We’re sort of watching the rhetoric on that and watching some of the think tanks around that. TPPF is actually very related to the Trump administration. A few folks from that think tank here in Texas actually are now working in the Trump administration. So nothing definite yet, but definitely that’s what a lot of people here are talking about.”
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