Recently, the US military carried out its first arrest operation in a military area established on the US-Mexico border, marking an unprecedented tough measure taken by the Trump administration in combating illegal immigration.
According to Reuters on June 9, a U.S. military spokesman revealed that on June 3, U.S. soldiers stationed near Santa Teresa, New Mexico seized three illegal entrants in the military area and handed them over to the U.S. Border Patrol.
This border military area covering New Mexico and Texas, with a total length of about 260 miles (418 kilometers), was declared as the "National Defense Area" by US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, giving garrison soldiers the power to temporarily detain illegal incoming people and other civilians across the border in these areas.
U.S. military spokesman Major Geoffrey Carmichael said in an email: "This is the first time that a ministry of defense personnel has conducted temporary arrests in a national defense zone."
The "new battlefield" to combat illegal immigration
For a long time, the US president has routinely dispatched active or reserve soldiers to assist in border patrol work, such as performing surveillance tasks and building fences.
But Trump went further this time, directly authorizing the army to arrest illegal entrants in specific areas, and conduct body searches and maintain order on the scene.
The trick of dividing the border area into a military base can be called Trump's "sharp stroke". In this way, he could allow the army to work on the border without using the Rebellion Act of 1807. Because the Rebellion Act gives the president the power to use federal troops to suppress civil unrest in the country, and easy activation will cause unrest.
Foreign media said that although the implementation of policies is unprecedented, the US military's operations have frequently hit walls at the judicial level.
For example, judges in New Mexico and Texas successively dismissed charges of illegal intrusion against dozens of migrants arrested in military areas and acquitted a Peruvian woman, citing no knowledge that they had entered the restricted area.
