The Trump administration is working on a plan to create what conservatives have long demanded: a militarized buffer zone along the southern border in New Mexico that would be occupied by active-duty US troops, empowered to detain migrants who cross into the United States unlawfully, the Washington Post reports.
According to the Post, recent internal discussions have centered on deploying troops to a section of the border in New Mexico that would be turned into a kind of military installation, which would give the soldiers a legal right to detain migrants who “trespass” on the elongated base. Unauthorized migrants would then be held until they can be turned over to immigration officers.
The planning appears to focus on creating a vast military installation as a way around the Posse Comitatus Act, a federal law that bars soldiers from participating in most civilian law enforcement missions.
Calls to militarize the southern border are not new, but so far they have existed more in the realm of political rhetoric than reality.
In 2022, Blake Masters, an Arizona Senate candidate enthusiastically backed by Peter Thiel, the same tech billionaire who bankrolled JD Vance’s campaign that year, ran a campaign ad promising to do just that.
In 2018, Trump abruptly announced during a White House meeting with then defense secretary Jim Mattis: “We are going to be guarding our border with our military. That’s a big step.”
Although the US president’s announcement sparked a flurry of reports, in the Washington Post and elsewhere, that he was serious about the proposal, it was never enacted at scale.
Seven months later, as Trump focused on the supposed threat of a migrant “caravan” on the eve of the 2018 midterm elections, Mattis defended the limited presence of troops at the southern border by saying: “We don’t do stunts in this department”.
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Mattis’s successor, Mark Esper, revealed in his memoir that Trump had apparently asked him to violate the Posse Comitatus Act in 2020. According to Esper, Trump asked him, a week after the murder of George Floyd, to deploy 10,000 active-duty troops to the streets of the nation’s capital and have them open fire on protesters. “Can’t you just shoot them?” Trump asked, in an Oval Office meeting. “Just shoot them in the legs or something?” Esper declined to do so.
One big difference between 2018, 2020 and 2025, however, is that Trump will not have to convince a sober, former general like Mattis or a West Point graduate like Esper to carry out his plan to divert military resources to domestic law enforcement, since his current defense secretary is a former weekend TV host who is far less likely to object.
