The U.S. military is taking control of more Texas land, citing “security operations along the U.S. southern border,” Defense One’s Thomas Novelly reported Tuesday. The seizure has raised questions among experts who note that border crossings have already plummeted and that charges stemming from the militarization of federal lands have been thrown out by judges.
What’s new: Nearly 200 more miles of the U.S. border with Mexico have been placed under Air Force supervision, enabling wider use of military force and heftier charges against people crossing illegally into the country, Novelly writes. Air Force leaders announced the changes Friday, militarizing two new swaths of land along the Rio Grande. One adds about 40 miles to the existing NDA 3, extending the zone upriver to Roma, Texas. The other is a 150-mile stretch from Falcon Dam to Del Rio that has been dubbed NDA 6. (Novelly’s article has a map.)
Background: Last June, Pentagon leaders announced that they would take charge of land along the final 250 miles of the Rio Grande, which had been administered by State Department employees on the International Boundary and Water Commission. Designated National Defense Area 3, the land was placed under the control of Joint Base San Antonio, which is operated by the Air Force. As with similar zones established last year, the NDA designation effectively turned the land into a military base that can be patrolled by troops. As well, trespassers are subject to misdemeanor charges related to illegally entering Defense Department property.
Panning out: Since April, the Trump administration has militarized border lands in Arizona, California, New Mexico, and Texas as extensions of Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps bases. By July, they covered roughly one-third of the U.S.-Mexico border.
“If you believe the administration’s line that there’s basically no more illegal immigration, it seems that the step is probably unnecessary,” said Jennifer Kavanagh, a senior fellow and director of military analysis at the Defense Priorities think tank. “I can’t really see a rationale for doing it,” she added. Continue reading, here.
Welcome to this Wednesday edition of The D Brief, a newsletter focused on developments affecting the future of U.S. national security, brought to you by Ben Watson with Bradley Peniston. It’s more important than ever to stay informed, so we’d like to take a moment to thank you for reading. Share your tips and feedback here. And if you’re not already subscribed, you can do that here. On this day in 1977, newly-elected Jimmy Carter became the first president to fly aboard the Boeing-made National Emergency Airborne Command Post—an E-4A aircraft, which has since been updated to an E-4B and is called the National Airborne Operations Center, or NAOC. (Hat tip today to Stephen Schwartz.)
Deportation nation
National security update: Less than 14% of those arrested by federal immigration agents had violent criminal records, CBS News reported off data spanning Trump’s first year back in the White House.
Why it matters: “Trump and his aides often talk about immigration officials targeting murderers, rapists and gangsters, [but] the internal data indicate that less than 2% of those arrested by [Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents] over the past year had homicide or sexual assault charges or convictions,” CBS reports. “Another 2% of those taken into ICE custody were accused of being gang members.” Meanwhile, a CBS survey last month “found that Americans’ support for Mr. Trump’s deportation efforts had fallen to 46%, down from 59% at the start of his second term.”
Another new survey found a 15-point rise in Americans who “strongly disapprove” of Trump’s handling of border security and immigration, NBC News reported Wednesday. In June 51% approved versus 49% who disapproved. But by the start of February, those numbers had flipped to 40% approving versus 60% disapproving.
Almost 75% of those surveyed also said they think ICE should be reformed or abolished. NBC’s online survey gathered results from nearly 22,000 Americans from Jan. 27 to Feb. 6.
By the way: A 14-year-old American in Idaho was zip-tied while watching her 6- and 8-year-old siblings during an immigration raid at a community horse racing event in the town of Wilder, about an hour from Boise, CBS News reported Tuesday. “On Tuesday, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a federal civil rights lawsuit highlighting the mistreatment of families attending the weekend recreation event at La Catedral Arena, many of whom were American citizens of Hispanic descent.”
A judge just dismissed with prejudice federal charges against an American who had been jailed for six months following a Los Angeles protest in August. The U.S. citizen was accused of assaulting a federal officer with a cloth hat during the protest, but in her dismissal Monday, the “judge noted discrepancies in officers’ statements,” including allegations the citizen hit the officers—which was not supported by video evidence of the encounter, the Guardian reports.
- In still more video footage contradicting federal officials’ account of a violent encounter with an American, the Chicago Sun-Times on Wednesday shared just-released video from Border Patrol agent Charles Exum during an incident in Chicago when he shot school teacher Marimar Martinez five times in October. “Martinez is expected to announce a new lawsuit stemming from her Oct. 4 shooting by a Border Patrol agent at a press conference Wednesday. Her attorneys say newly released evidence will show an agent lied to the FBI about firing five shots into her front windshield,” the newspaper reports.
ICE’s five-stage “detention pipeline” for Americans that runs from Minnesota to Texas is documented by Just Security’s Ryan Goodman and Sophia Khoroushi, who dug through court records for a special report published Wednesday. “U.S. citizens have been caught up in all five stages, as have individuals who are legal residents and others with pending legal status,” Goodman and Khoroushi write. “Indeed, of the three exits out of the pipeline, many have been released pursuant to a court order finding the government unlawfully detained them.”
Update: ICE has spent more than a half billion dollars to buy warehouses to concentrate migrants in detention, including in locations across Maryland, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Texas and Georgia. “If these mega-camps are utilized to the full capacity ICE intends, they’ll be the largest prisons in the country, with little real oversight,” warned Aaron Reichlin-Melnick of the American Immigration Council.
For some perspective, “Right now Rikers Island, the physically largest jail in the entire United States, is holding under 7,000 people,” he writes. “ICE’s warehouse plans include detention camps which will hold between 8,500-10,000 people in buildings not designed for human habitation.”
Those warehouses are becoming a “symbol of resistance,” the New York Times reported Sunday. Similar to the CBS and NBC polls noted above, the Times cited their own recent survey to note that “A broad majority of voters—63 percent—disapprove of the way ICE is handling its job,” while “Sixty-one percent of voters said that ICE had ‘gone too far,’ including nearly one in five Republicans.”
That resistance is even reaching Republican-dominated regions like Byhalia, Mississippi, as GOP Sen. Roger Wicker noted last week, according to the Mississippi Free Press. “From my understanding, the ICE detention facility would have a capacity exceeding 8,500 beds,” Wicker wrote in a Facebook post on Friday. “Existing medical and human services infrastructure in Byhalia is insufficient to support such a large detainee population. Establishing a detention center at this site would place significant strain on local resources.”
But ICE is “expanding across the U.S. at breakneck speed,” WIRED reported Tuesday, documenting what it calls “a secret, monthslong expansion campaign.”
“Documents show that more than 150 leases and office expansions have or would place new facilities in nearly every state, many of them in or just outside of the country’s largest metropolitan areas,” WIRED’s Leah Fieger writes. “In many cases, these facilities, which are to be used by street-level agents and ICE attorneys, are located near elementary schools, medical offices, places of worship, and other sensitive locations.”
DHS is also asking officials to hide lease listings due to “national security concerns,” according to emails and memos with the General Services Administration. It’s also been bypassing legislation “that requires open competition among bidders for federal building and lease procurements.” Read more, here.
On Capitol Hill, a stalemate over ICE reform is threatening to shut down DHS by midnight on Friday, the Times reported Tuesday. The latest sticking points include “unmasking those engaged in the immigration roundups and new requirements for warrants for searches and arrests.”
And speaking of Capitol Hill, a grand jury on Tuesday refused to indict six Democratic lawmakers over their video encouraging U.S. troops to disobey “illegal orders” in the wake of the military’s airstrike campaign to kill people aboard alleged drug-trafficking boats in the waters around Latin America. More than three-dozen of those strikes have killed at least 130 people to date, according to the Defense Department. NBC News called the indictment “the latest example of the Justice Department’s targeting the president’s perceived political opponents” in a case led by “political appointees, not career Justice Department prosecutors.”
“Today wasn’t just an embarrassing day for the Administration. It was another sad day for our country,” said one of those lawmakers, former Pentagon official Elissa Slotkin, a Democratic senator from Michigan, writing on social media after the grand jury’s decision. “Trump continues to weaponize our justice system against his perceived enemies. It’s the kind of thing you see in a foreign country, not in the United States we know and love.”
To amplify its social media output, DHS just hired a 21-year-old who was known to post white-supremacist messages while working at the Labor Department, the New York Times reported Wednesday. His name is Peyton Rollins, and he’s authored dozens of posts using imagery and fonts “reminiscent of the 1920s and 1930s,” including the Fraktur font, which “had been used in early Nazi government documents and on the original cover of Hitler’s book, ‘Mein Kampf,’” the Times reports.
While at the Department of Labor, he also posted nearly 20 times using “phrases associated with QAnon, an internet conspiracy theory,” in addition to “violent language and a recurrent antisemitic trope” on the government’s social media account.
Additional reading:
Around the Defense Department
Every soldier is a drone operator. That’s the watchword at Fort Stewart, Georgia, where the 3rd Infantry Division is working on a pair of courses to certify troops to operate small unmanned aerial systems. “The legacy UAS systems were focused on dedicated 15-series UAS operators, whereas now, we’re leaning more toward training standard infantry and armor soldiers to be the UAS operators,”said Capt. Brenden Shutt, the division’s innovation officer. It’s part of a servicewide effort to create doctrine around using drones throughout every formation. Defense One’s Meghann Myers has more, here.
Air Force hones its hub-and-spoke approach to basing. Today’s USAF leaders aren’t axing quite all of the previous administration’s efforts to prepare for a possible fight with China. For example, they’re are continuing to implement Agile Combat Employment, the service’s undersecretary said last week. “We cannot just project force and operate out of our main operating bases,” Matthew Lohmeier told a small group of reporters here as he wrapped up a trip around the Pacific. Defense One’s Jennifer Hlad reports from Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam, here.
FAA announced a 10-day halt to El Paso flights—then lifted it with conflicting explanations. At 11:30 p.m. on Tuesday, the Federal Aviation Administration shut down all flights to the West Texas city, surprising state and local officials, the New York Times reported.
But the halt was lifted Wednesday morning before an aviation official told Politico the Defense Department had been testing counter-drone technology “without sharing critical safety information” with the Federal Aviation Administration. Those tests originated from the Biggs Army Airfield at Fort Bliss, CNN reported.
But Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said an unspecified “cartel drone incursion” caused the closure. “The threat has been neutralized, and there is no danger to commercial travel in the region,” Duffy wrote on social media.
More reading:
Lastly today: “Inside a Military Bootcamp With Green Berets Training for Arctic Warfare,” a first-person video narrative by a Wall Street Journal reporter who jumped into freezing waters along with the operators.
