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.
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.
"Crossings and basically immigration as a whole, has been way down since at least last June," Woodward said. "So, I honestly don't know what these troops are going to be doing down there."
If recent missions are any indicator, there are likely to be headwinds tied to the surge of troops to the border.
One of the largest widespread border patrol efforts in recent years has been Operation Lone Star, the Texas National Guard's major effort at the southern border that has been in place since 2021. During that mission, reports of poor quality of life and brutal living conditions led to many soldiers speaking out. A state government hearing last year revealed that 17 Guardsmen had died while on the mission, including from reported suicides, drownings and accidental shootings.
"When they were first spinning it up, because I think of the political haste behind it,
you know, operationally, the logistics were a f---ing sh-- show," a former Texas National Guardsman, who served with Operation Lone Star, told Military.com. "It was just a disaster from top to bottom in a lot of ways."
Fight and Flight
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."
Gil Guerra, an immigration policy analyst at the nonprofit Niskanen Center, said that videos and pictures of the military in action are important to Trump's administration.
"The most obvious and evident one is that the administration is really concerned with optics and how things look, especially how things look to the average voter and the average American," Guerra said.
Cost analysis has also shown that those flights are very expensive. Reuters detailed that the cost of one military deportation to Guatemala was at least $4,675 per migrant, more than five times the price of a first-class commercial ticket. The Wall Street Journal reported that military flights to Guantanamo cost roughly $20,000 per migrant.
Evidence for immigrants' potential ties to criminal groups and gangs, a key rationale behind their deportation without legal proceedings, has been seemingly thin, such as news reports that a 36-year-old professional soccer player and coach from Venezuela was sent to a maximum security prison in El Salvador after authorities said his tattoo honoring the Real Madrid soccer team was allegedly indicative of membership in the Tren de Aragua crime organization.
In addition to the military flights, there has also been a push to force more intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance assets at the southern border with more than 100 sorties flown including with the RC-135 Combat Sent, P-8 Poseidon, RQ-4 Global Hawk, U-2 Dragon Lady and MQ-1 Predator, according to the Department of Defense. Earlier this month, 40 intelligence analysts from Air Force active and reserve components were also added to Joint Intelligence Task Force-Southern Border's operations.
Looking for Loopholes
While the military has been involved in deportation flights and detention, service members do not have the authority to arrest citizens like law enforcement agencies. However, there have been recent maneuvers aimed at testing that restriction.
Since Trump took office, border patrol officials have formally deputized hundreds of members of the Texas National Guard, giving them "authority to apprehend and detain individuals who cross the border illegally, moving beyond their previous roles of observation and assistance," a Feb. 27 U.S. Customs and Border Patrol news release said.
But that release also notes that the new authority allows the Texas National Guard only to "actively make arrests at the direction and supervision of a Border Patrol Agent."
A former Guardsman with Operation Lone Star said he views it as an example of optics over practicality.
"They made a spectacle out of, like, deputizing these soldiers but ... they're only going to arrest migrants in the presence of a CBP or other law enforcement officer," the former Guardsman said. "So, deputizing never really didn't change anything at all. It just made for a really nice photo op."
Woodward said there are still concerns about National Guardsmen taking on these expanded roles, especially because they're often not trained in the same way law enforcement is to handle these types of apprehensions. He said his organization is aware of several cases of migrant abuses at the hands of Guardsmen.
He took a legal declaration from a man who crossed the border in El Paso with his wife and two children who encountered Guardsmen they say began hurling racist insults at them just last year.
The attorney told Military.com the Guardsmen hit the father in the face with the butt of his rifle and then later told them they had 15 or 30 seconds to run to the gate where the Border Patrol was stationed, adding "if you don't make it, we'll shoot you." Woodward also detailed the incident in a report tracking numerous National Guard abuses during Operation Lone Star.
In response to past media coverage of that incident, the Texas Military Department said it was "committed to ensuring that the civil rights of all persons are respected regardless of their status while simultaneously enforcing the laws of the State of Texas."
"The military is trained to deploy, to do things to keep us safe from things like outside invading armies, not people who are just trying to cross the border to seek a better life, and they don't have the kind of training to do this," Woodward said. "They wind up often taking things too far and treating people the wrong way, because they're trained for a much more aggressive posture than what's appropriate in a civil immigration proceeding."
In addition to allowing Guardsmen to apprehend migrants with deputy authorities, the potential of using the Roosevelt Reservation as a way for active-duty soldiers to apprehend migrants is also raising concerns.
Jennifer Kavanagh, a senior fellow and director of military analysis at the think tank Defense Priorities, told Military.com that transferring federal land for that kind of border operation is a notable change in tactics.
"Regardless of how they're going to use it, it would be a major step because it would be a departure from what has been the past of just using active-duty forces at the border as you would use CBP [Customs and Border Protection] or National Guard personnel," Kavanagh said.
Guerra said the Roosevelt Reservation is an example of how the administration is willing to push new strategies and that it could be a framework for further ideas.
"There's always these sort of test cases where I think the admin sees what it can do. What will get blocked by a court injunction, if they ignore some injunctions, what will happen?" Guerra said. "It does seem indicative to me that it is, again, an early sort of test case for further actions along those lines."
Flooding the Frontier
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.
In an online notice to his constituents on Wednesday, David Beebe, a Presidio County commissioner, said he's received both "positive and negative" emails about the military's sudden and growing presence in the area. While he said many were staying in area hotels, he also said that the Army was debating whether to set up "Expeditionary Deployable Units" or container-like facilities at the airports. He also said the service was "coming for a minimum six-month commitment up to possibly four years."
Many of the early issues with Operation Lone Star stemmed from the lack of proper shelter and facilities for soldiers, the former Texas Guardsman told Military.com. While those conditions gradually improved, the active-duty forces are starting from scratch in many ways.
Strykers have already been pictured on social media in the area, with one Border Patrol Instagram post showing video of the armored vehicles driving through the desert set to the song "No More Mr. Nice Guy" by rock star Alice Cooper.
Beebe added that he was told the military's armored vehicles served a dual purpose, introducing troops and their equipment "as a friendly force" and also "as a notice to the cartels across the border that the military has arrived."
It's unclear how the military's large-scale deployment of 6,600 active-duty forces on Title 10 federal orders will affect readiness in other areas for the Pentagon, Kavanagh told Military.com. But she said it's likely going to take a toll.
"When you're now deploying them to the border in large numbers, you're putting additional strain on units that are already stressed, and eventually that takes a toll on these deployments," Kavanagh said.
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.
Advocates like Woodward fear the expansion of the military's footprint into detention facilities at U.S. bases, pointing out similarities to internment camps used during World War II to house those of Japanese descent.
"Those conditions will be deplorable," Woodward said. "The military is not set up to do that, right now, well."
Related: Military's Border Mission Now Includes Coordinated Patrols with Mexican Counterparts
