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The Defense Department has announced that it has added an additional 250-mile (400-kilometer) zone last week in Texas’ Rio Grande Valley and plans another near Yuma, Arizona. Combined, the zones will cover nearly one-third of the U.S. border with Mexico as an escalation in the Trump Administration policy of militarization of the borderlands.
Orange no-entry signs posted by the U.S. military in English and Spanish now dot the New Mexico desert, where a border wall cuts past family farms, open fields and dry parched ranches with little greenery growing amidst wiry brush and yucca trees in the borderlands.
These military zones are now patrolled by at least 7,600 members of the armed forces, vastly expanding the U.S. government presence on the border.
Reaction to the military buffer has been mixed among residents of New Mexico's rural southern counties, where a strong Libertarian culture of individual property rights and liberty is tempered by the desire to squelch networks bringing migrants and contraband across the border.
A concern raised by local borderlands hunters and hikers is a fear they’re being locked out of a rugged and cherished landscape that is excellent for wild hunting, bird watching and rugged hiking.
Nicole Wieman, an Army command spokesperson, in a press statement said, the Army is negotiating possible public access for recreation and hunting, and will honor private rights to grazing and mining as exemptions being worked through under this presidential mandate.
More than 1,400 migrants have been charged with trespassing on military territory, facing a possible 18-month prison sentence for a first offense. That’s on top of an illegal entry charge that brings up to six months in custody. After that, most are turned over to U.S. Customs and Border Protection for likely deportation. There have been no apparent arrests of U.S. citizens reported as of yet.
Oversight is divided between U.S. Army commands in Fort Bliss, Texas, and Fort Huachuca, Arizona. The militarized zones sidestep the Posse Comitatus Act, an 1878 law that prohibits the military from conducting civilian law enforcement on U.S. soil via presidential decree.
Court challenges to trespassing charges in the militarized zone have met with a mixture of convictions and acquittals at trial.
Ryan Ellison, the top federal prosecutor in New Mexico, won trespassing convictions in June against two immigrants who entered a militarized zone again after an initial warning. “There’s not going to be an issue as to whether or not they were on notice,” he told a recent news conference. With the new signage and expansion that appears to be true.
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