The Trump administration cleverly transferred part of the ‘Roosevelt Reservation’, a border strip of land, to the US Army which it will control and be able to arrest and prevent illegal alien invaders from crossing.
It’s a clever gimmick for getting the military to secure the border.
Once the Army accepts jurisdiction of that land, it will become part of a national defense area — a specified piece of federal land over which DOD maintains administrative authority and jurisdiction and is permitted to establish and enforce a controlled perimeter and access.
The area will be considered an extension of Fort Huachuca, Arizona.
To deter unlawful entry, service members will construct and position temporary barriers, detect and monitor the use of routes across or adjacent to the area and apprehend individuals who breach the barriers. Service members will place signs and construct temporary barriers to visibly indicate the boundaries.
Under the new arrangement, military personnel will continue to work together with U.S. Customs and Border Protection personnel to establish and enforce a controlled perimeter and controlled access to the area as part of an effort to repel unlawful mass migration, narcotics trafficking, migrant smuggling, human trafficking and other cross-border criminal activities.
.@SecretaryBurgum: We’re transferring the Roosevelt Reservation to the DOD. If someone now steps across the border onto that strip controlled by the Department of Defense, they’re basically trespassing on a Defense installation… that allows our military to detain someone until… pic.twitter.com/WjEQbRWXYQ
— Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) April 18, 2025
It’s, as I said, clever, and there are clever people coming up with this stuff, but like a lot of gimmicks, it may not survive a legal challenge even at the Supreme Court level. The next step will probably be employing the Insurrection Act, but unlike the BLM riots, it’s also unnecessary.
Put plainly, if the Army can’t be deployed to secure the border, then it has no function. The notion that it’s illegal to use the Army to secure the border contradicts the very concept of what an Army is.
The objections derive from the Posse Comitatus Act, a dubious piece of legislation championed by ex-slave politicians and radical labor sympathizers or, in short, Democrats, but while some of their objections to using the military to suppress domestic opposition were legitimate, the Act clearly cannot and does not apply to securing the border which is not a matter of enforcing domestic laws, but securing the border from external invasion.
Eisenhower’s use of the Insurrection Act to enforce desegregation, exactly the kind of thing that the Posse Comitatus Act was meant to prevent, already made a mockery of the Act.
But let’s get back to the Posse Comitatus Act which does not apply to deployments “expressly authorized by the Constitution”. The original purpose of the Army was to secure the border from external invasions.
Long after the Posse Comitatus Act had been passed, the United States Army was stationed at the Mexican border during the incidents in the early 20th century.
President Trump has the right to deploy the Army to secure the border. And it’s important to make the point that every administration has the right to do that without resorting to gimmicks. To secure the border is not a policing power, but a matter of securing the nation. The Army is not being treated like a ‘posse’ here, but is performing its primary function.
Either that or get around the whole matter by transferring control of the US Army to the Coast Guard.
That would be a silly and unnecessary gimmick. It’s important to both secure the border and create a clear precedent for doing so in the future.
