politics

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.