By Andrew Hay
SANTA TERESA, NM (Reuters) -The weapons system atop a drab green U.S. Army Stryker swivels, its camera shifting downward toward a white Ford F-150 driving slowly along the U.S.-Mexico border.
Under the watchful eye of the 26-ton armored vehicle perched on a sand dune above them, humanitarian volunteers are driving the dirt road next to the border wall to see if they can continue to search for migrant remains inside one of two military zones established along the border by the Trump administration in April and May.
Soon, they get their answer.
It’s not long before an unmarked gray pickup appears, makes a U-turn in the sand, and puts on its siren, here in the desert 5.6 miles (9 km) west of the Santa Teresa, New Mexico border crossing.
The driver pulls alongside, introduces himself as a U.S. Border Patrol agent, and tells the volunteers they can no longer be there.
James Holman, founder of the Battalion Search and Rescue group, whose volunteers also hand water to migrants through the bars of the barrier, acquiesces.
Then he vents his frustration.
“We’re ramping up all this military and taking this public land away, it doesn’t make sense, and it’s theater, it’s deadly, deadly theater,” says Holman, 59, a former Marine.
They are in one of two so-called “National Defense Areas” set up along 260 miles (418 km) of the U.S. southern border in New Mexico and Texas as part of the Trump administration’s military buildup on the border.
U.S. President Donald Trump has long shown interest in using the military for civilian law enforcement, sending Marines to Los Angeles this week in their first domestic deployment in over 30 years.
The border military zones are one of his most audacious attempts yet to use troops trained for overseas combat in roles normally carried out by Border Patrol or local police.
The Army has not made public the zones’ boundaries. The New Mexico area may run over three miles into the United States, in places, based on “restricted area” warning signs in English and Spanish posted along State Road 9 parallel to the border.
The zones are classified as U.S. Army installations, giving troops the right to temporarily detain and question migrants and other civilian trespassers caught in the areas.
Their primary mission is to detect and track illegal border crossers as part of the Trump administration’s quest for “100% operational control” of the border at a time when migrant arrests are near an historic low.
Along the international boundary, Reuters saw warning signs posted inside the United States around 45 feet north of the border barrier around every 100 meters, facing south. That meant if you had crossed the border and could read them, you were already in the zone.
Migrants caught illegally crossing the border into the zones face new trespassing charges on top of unlawful entry to the country, with combined penalties of up to 10 years imprisonment. Attempts to prosecute them for trespassing have floundered.
Starting in May, federal judges in Texas and New Mexico have dismissed trespassing charges against migrants caught within the area and acquitted a Peruvian woman brought to trial, ruling there was no evidence they saw signs before entering the zone.
Illegal border crossings fell to a record low in March after the Biden administration shut down asylum claims in 2024 and Mexico tightened immigration controls.
Trump, who banned people from claiming asylum on the southern border shortly after starting his second term in January, nonetheless says the military areas are needed to repel an “invasion” of human traffickers and drug smugglers.
BORDER BUILDUP
In the past four months Trump raised the number of active-duty troops on the border to 8,000 from 2,500 at the end of the Biden administration, according to the U.S. Army.
Presidents since Richard Nixon have used regular troops and reservists for support roles on the border. Trump has taken it a step further.
The Bureau of Land Management in April transferred 110,000 acres (172 square miles) of land in New Mexico, an area seven times the size of Manhattan, to the U.S. Army for three years to establish a first zone. A second was created in May with a transfer of International Boundary and Water Commission land in Texas.
The areas are satellites of the Fort Huachuca and Fort Bliss Army bases in Arizona and Texas, respectively.
That gives troops the right to hold and question civilian trespassers without the need for Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act. The law lets a president deploy federal forces domestically during events like civil unrest.
Some 105 Stryker combat vehicles and around 2,400 troops from the 4th Infantry Division deployed from Colorado Springs in March. They rove in armored personnel carriers across New Mexico, Texas and Arizona.
Reuters saw Strykers concentrated in a roughly 20-mile ribbon from El Paso west to Santa Teresa, one of the 2,000-mile border’s busiest and most deadly areas for migrant crossings.
The 8-wheeled vehicles, used by Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan, and now by Ukraine in its war with Russia, can be seen parked under a bridge to Mexico, atop a landfill and on a ridge above a gap in the border wall.
Their engines run 24/7 to cool crews in the 100 F. (38 C.) plus heat. Vehicles are unarmed but soldiers have personal weapons. Crews take shifts operating the joystick-controlled camera systems that can see for two miles (3.2 km) and have night vision, according to the Army.
A person familiar with Strykers, who asked not to be named, said the work was “monotonous” but said it gave soldiers “a sense of purpose.”
Troops have alerted Border Patrol to 390 illegal crossings in the nearly two months since the first zone was established. They made their first detentions on June 3, holding 3 “illegal aliens” in New Mexico before handing them over to Border Patrol, according to Army spokesperson Geoffrey Carmichael.
Border Patrol arrested 39,677 migrants in the El Paso sector in the fiscal year to April, down 78% from the year-earlier period.
‘COVERED BY DESERT SAND’
Sitting outside his juice bar in Sunland Park, Harold Gregory says he has seen a sharp drop in migrants entering his store or asking customers for a ride since Strykers arrived.
“We feel safer,” said Gregory, 38. “They do kind of like intimidate so there’s not so many people come this way.”
In neighboring Santa Teresa, trade consultant Jerry Pacheco says the optics of combat vehicles are not good as he tries to draw international firms to the town’s industrial park.
“It’s like killing an ant with a sledgehammer,” says Pacheco, executive director of the International Business Accelerator, a nonprofit trade counseling program. “I think having the military down here is more of a political splash.”
About 90 miles (143 km) west, New Mexico rancher Russell Johnson said he saw five Strykers briefly positioned in a gap in the border barrier on his ranch.
He welcomes the zone as an extra layer of security and has testified to the U.S. Congress on illegal border crossers destroying barbed wire fences, cattle thieves driving livestock into Mexico and a pickup stolen at gunpoint by drug smugglers.
He is unsure if his home, or over half his ranch, is inside the area but has been assured by U.S. Border Patrol he can continue to work land ranched by his family since 1918.
“I don’t know, I don’t think anyone knows,” says Johnson, 37, a former Border Patrol agent, of the zone’s boundaries.
He says the Army has not communicated rules for hunters with permits to shoot quail and mule deer this fall in the military area, or hikers who start or end the 3,000-mile (4,800 km) Continental Divide Trail within it.
The Army has been seeking memoranda of understanding with local communities and agencies to continue activities in the New Mexico zone, said Nicole Wieman, a U.S. Army spokesperson.
“The MOU process for commercial and recreational activities, such as hunting, mining and ranching, is complex,” Wieman said.
Jenifer Jones, Republican state representative for Johnson’s area, said Americans can keep doing what they did before in the zone.
“They can carry their firearms as they would have prior,” said Jones, who welcomed the troops to her “neglected” area where only a barbed-wire fence separates the two countries in places.
To the east in Las Cruces, the state’s second largest city, State Representative Sarah Silva, a Democrat, said the zones have created fear and apprehension
“I see this as an occupation of the U.S. Army on our lands,” said Silva.
Back in desert west of Santa Teresa, Battalion Search and Rescue leader Abbey Carpenter, 67, stands among dunes where the group has discovered the remains of 24 migrants in 18 months, mostly women. She is concerned the area could be absorbed into the military zone.
“Who’s going to look for these remains if we’re not allowed out here,” she said, showing the jaw and other uncollected bones of a woman her group reported to local authorities in September. “Will they just be covered up by the desert sands?”
(Reporting By Andrew Hay; editing by Donna Bryson and Michael Learmonth)
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