U.S. declares military zone around El Paso, allowing soldiers to arrest migrants

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The Pentagon has created a second military zone in the El Paso area that U.S. soldiers will patrol as part of the Trump administration’s efforts to crack down on people crossing the southern border illegally, even as crossings are at a historic low.

In a statement Thursday, the military’s Northern Command said the latest military zone will be part of the Fort Bliss Army base in El Paso. The military newspaper Stars and Stripes reported that the area stretches about 53 miles east to the border community of Fort Hancock, according to Maj. Geoffrey Carmichael, spokesman for the Joint Task Force – Southern Border.

“The establishment of a second National Defense Area increases our operational reach and effectiveness in denying illegal activity along the southern border,” said Gen. Gregory Guillot, the commander of U.S. Northern Command.

Last month, the Pentagon designated a 60-foot-wide strip of land along the New Mexico-Mexico border as a military zone. On Monday, federal prosecutors charged more than two dozen migrants with violating security regulations after the U.S. Army spotted the group approaching the area and alerted Border Patrol agents. That charge is in addition to the charge of entering the U.S. illegally. Both are misdemeanors.

Geoffrey S. Corn, director of the Center for Military Law and Policy at Texas Tech University School of Law and retired U.S. Army lieutenant colonel, said that for more than two centuries the federal government has prohibited the U.S. military from enforcing civilian laws, in part because soldiers’ mission isn’t law enforcement.

“They’re trained as warriors,” Corn said.

Still, he said, the Trump administration has found an ingenious way of using the military for immigration enforcement without asking Congress for permission.

Under the Posse Comitatus Act, the U.S. military is prohibited from conducting civilian law enforcement. However, an exception known as the military purpose doctrine allows it in some cases.

“Using the military as part of border security reinforces the perception and the narrative that the nation is under some type of invasion,” he said. “But the facts contradict the assertion of an invasion because the number of border crossings has been steadily dropping for some time now.”

In March, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security reported encountering 1,627 migrants in the El Paso sector, which includes all of New Mexico’s border as well as El Paso and Hudspeth counties in West Texas. That’s an 87% decrease from August 2024, when the downward trend began.

Aimée Santillán, a policy analyst at the Hope Border Institute, an immigrant rights advocacy group in El Paso, said the “militarization of our border has long been of great concern here in the borderlands.

“This escalation is deeply concerning since it not only represents a further step in criminalizing migrants attempting to seek asylum at the border but has the potential to also affect humanitarian aid, during a time when migrant deaths in the El Paso Border Patrol Sector have been soaring.”

According to federal government data collected by No More Deaths, a migrant aid and advocacy group in Tucson, Arizona, at least 176 migrants died in the El Paso sector in 2024, continuing a decade-long upward trend. The federal government documented one migrant death in the sector in 2014.

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