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President Trump opens border lands to military control
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LAS CRUCES — In a step that could lead to heavier involvement of the armed forces at the U.S.-Mexico border, President Donald Trump issued a memorandum Friday opening a strip of federal land along the international boundary to military use.
The document, titled “Military Mission for Sealing the Southern Border of the United States and Repelling Invasions,” directs the secretaries of Defense, Homeland Security, Interior and Agriculture to coordinate in granting access and legal jurisdiction for “national defense areas” at the border.
“Our southern border is under attack from a variety of threats. The complexity of the current situation requires that our military take a more direct role in securing our southern border than in the recent past,” the memo states.
Providing guidance for enforcing the president’s Jan. 20 emergency declaration at the border, the memo authorizes military control of the 60-foot-wide strip of federal land known as the Roosevelt Reservation, a buffer extending from California to New Mexico. In 1907, President Theodore Roosevelt reserved “all public lands within sixty feet of the international boundary between the United States and the Republic of Mexico, within the State of California and the Territories of Arizona and New Mexico” as a buffer against international smuggling.
Friday’s memo directs the Interior secretary to “make withdrawals, reservations, and restrictions of public lands” as needed to support military installations as well as the construction of border fencing and staging of surveillance technology in the strip, excluding Native American reservations.
It also authorizes the Defense secretary to extend those activities to additional federal land at the border in coordination with Homeland Security and the White House.
