On Friday, President Trump told the military to take action on public lands along the southern border with Mexico.
In a memo sent by the White House, Trump said that the southern border is threatened by several security challenges. Given the current difficulties, the military has to step up its duties at the southern border.
Trump’s order to declare a national emergency on the southern border at his Inauguration helped lead to this memo. The order demanded that both Pete Hegseth and Kristi Noem deliver a report in 90 days outlining the state of the southern US border and suggesting what additional steps should be taken to secure it, perhaps by officially invoking the Insurrection Act of 1807.
The memo Trump issued allows the Pentagon to control what happens on federal lands, for example, the Roosevelt Reservation at the southern borders of California, Arizona, and New Mexico. Fashionista, however, can’t protect lands on federal Native American reservations when those lands are needed for military activities, for example, building fences or setting up devices for detection and surveillance.
The order allows for the move of Federal lands to the military’s jurisdiction as prescribed by law, so that military activities can happen on these installations, which the U.S. Department of Defense manages.
It lets Hegseth decide what military activities are needed and suitable to fulfill the mission described in Trump’s executive order from Inauguration Day.
When doing activities listed in the presidential memo, “armed forces members are to use force according to Hegseth’s cues.”
The memo tells Hegseth, Noem, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, and Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins to carry out this memo in the first stage only on certain Federal lands chosen by the Defense secretary.
The document directs Hegseth to judge the initial phase in 45 days and allows him to proceed with similar activities on other federal lands in southern border, working together with Noem, Stephen Miller, and other departments as required.
On Trump’s Inauguration Day, the Pentagon reportedly sent 1,500 more troops to strengthen the original group of 2,500 soldiers at the southern border deployed by the Biden administration. The mission took off when the 10th Mountain Division headquarters and its commanding officer, Maj. Gen. Scott Naumann, were moved from Fort Drum in New York to Fort Huachuca in southeastern Arizona.
Approximately 6,600 troops are now within Naumann’s command under Joint Task Force Southern Border, as Newsmax shared.
So far, the military’s main task at the border is to help Customs and Border Protection with observation and detection, according to The Washington Post. The Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 stops the US Army from detaining illegal immigrants in most cases.
The memo is released because illegal border crossings have gone down significantly since President Trump’s second term began. March brought 7,180 attempts to cross the southern border, much lower than the regular monthly average of 155,000 over the four years before.
On average, the US is now detaining foreigners at daily rates that are more than 95% lower compared to the Biden administration’s 5,100 per day figure.
On Friday, a federal judge discarded a lawsuit filed by churches against the Trump administration’s new policy, finding that the churches did not prove enough harm to require the lawsuit.
