President Donald Trump issued a memorandum on April 11 ordering the U.S. military to take control of a swath of federal land along the southern border. The move is part of a series of actions by the White House to crack down on U.S.-Mexico border crossings while skating around federal law.
The memorandum would give the military jurisdiction over the Roosevelt Reservation, a 60-foot-wide strip of land that stretches along the southern border from California to New Mexico. It designates the reservation as a U.S. Army base, allowing the military to exert control over the area in what some are calling an unprecedented display of executive power over the U.S.-Mexico border. Trump’s memorandum is also likely to face judicial challenges.
‘The furthest the Trump administration has gone yet’
The memorandum would “empower troops to detain people attempting to illegally enter the U.S. within the stretch of land,” said Politico. This would mark a significant “escalation in the president’s use of the military to facilitate his sweeping crackdown on immigration.” Border patrol arrests have generally been performed by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and U.S. Customs and Border Protection. There are already 7,000 troops “stationed at the border under Trump’s national emergency declaration,” but they have “only provided logistical support” and cannot arrest people, said KOAT-TV Albuquerque.
The memorandum is part of a plan by Trump to “get around a federal law that prohibits U.S. troops from being used in domestic law enforcement on American soil,” said The Associated Press. This law, the Posse Comitatus Act, generally prevents American soldiers from arresting migrants crossing the border. But the law also says that troops can be deployed for law enforcement if they “are providing security for land that is part of an Army base” — and Trump’s memorandum designates this land as such, allowing him to circumvent the law.
People who are seen trying to cross the border illegally within this strip of land “could be arrested by the Army’s security forces,” said the AP. People arrested by the military would then “be turned over to local civilian law enforcement agencies.” The Army is currently planning to test this system for the next 45 days, said the outlet, at which time the memorandum will be reassessed.
The consequences ‘aren’t immediately clear’
The legality of Trump’s memorandum remains up in the air. But the “consequences [of] DOD taking control of federal land at the border aren’t immediately clear,” Adam Isacson, the director of defense oversight for the Washington Office on Latin America think tank, said to USA Today. But it could mean that there are “more severe criminal charges for migrants who cross the border unlawfully.” In particular, these migrants could be “subjected to ‘charges beyond ‘entry without inspection,’ a federal misdemeanor.”
This is one of several steps that Trump has taken to try and crack down on immigration. A day before the memorandum was issued, a federal judge “ruled that the Trump administration was allowed to require people who are in the country but not citizens to register with the federal government, a requirement that advocates say hasn’t been universally implemented since it was enacted as a law in the 1940s,” said The Guardian.
And it seems Trump’s actions, controversial as they are, are already working; in Southern California, migrant crossings “have slowed to a near halt, bringing a striking change to the landscape” of the state, said the Los Angeles Times. And despite Trump’s claim that criminals are invading the U.S., illegal “border crossings have plunged to historic lows since Trump took office,” said Politico; there were reportedly 7,200 migrant encounters in March 2025, down from 189,000 in March 2024.
The move could allow US troops to detain people crossing the border