More than a third of Arizona’s roughly 370-mile-long border with Mexico will soon be a military zone. It’s the Trump administration’s latest of four so-called National Defense Areas, known as NDAs, along the border.
The first NDA, set up along a 170-mile stretch of border in New Mexico in April, came days after an executive order from President Donald Trump. The order called on the military to repel an “invasion” at the border and directed several federal agencies to transfer control of public land to the Defense Department — including a 60-foot stretch right along the border in Arizona, California and New Mexico called Roosevelt Reservation.
Hundreds have been detained inside New Mexico's military zone on misdemeanor charges for trespassing on military property since then. At least two Mexican nationals have been convicted so far.
The Trump administration says Arizona’s upcoming military zone will run along a 140-mile stretch of border near the Marine Corps Air Station in Yuma. About 500 Marines and Sailors will operate there, according to a spokesperson with the military’s border task force, who said specific tasks and assignment details are still under development.
The Department of Defense hasn’t provided an exact map of the area, but says only federal land will be included. In an email, Capt. Owen VanWyck, COMMSTRAT director of Marine Corps Air Station in Yuma, said the area is still pending a land transfer from the Department of Interior, and will include the Barry M. Goldwater Range, land surrounding it and the immediate U.S.-Mexico border area.
“It would begin at the boundary of Organ Pipe National Monument, its eastern boundary, that connects to the Tohono O’odham Reservation, heading west through Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge,” said Myles Traphagen, borderlands program coordinator for the Wildlands Network.
Traphagen has spent years now mapping rugged public land along the border in Arizona and New Mexico and how it’s been altered by wall construction. He says once the mileage was released for Yuma’s National Defense Area, he got work mapping how it might look.
“It was like a puzzle piece, just you know, because of mapping the border wall, I have a pretty good mental map of where’s the land ownership, how much distance is there,” he said.
Military deployments elsewhere
On a muggy July morning, Trapagen’s truck is bouncing along a graded dirt that snakes along the border through mountainous terrain just east of Nogales, Arizona. As the crow flies, it’s about 100 miles east of where he estimates the Yuma-area military zone will begin.
Around us, long green arms of ocotillo plants stretch toward the sky on the Arizona side. Hilltops homes across the border in Nogales, Sonora, poke out from behind a metal bollard wall.
“So this border wall was built in 2008, and this is the one that goes east from Nogales to Kino Springs, where the Santa Cruz River re-enters the U.S. from Mexico,” he said.
This area isn’t part of the military zone taking shape in the Yuma-area. But that doesn’t mean the military isn’t here.
As Traphagen’s truck dips down into a valley, we pass a big metal Stryker that’s perched on a strip of road above us. It’s a tank-like military vehicle with eight rubber wheels and no gun mount. A soldier's legs poke out from behind the open door.
“So that’s the first sign of a Stryker vehicle I’ve seen here,” Traphagen said. “So this is the actual militarization of the border that we’re observing here.”
One hundred members of Army’s 2nd Stryker Brigade Combat Team have been here since March. A military spokesperson says the soldiers are providing Customs and Border Protection with advanced surveillance and logistics support.
They’re some of thousands of troops deployed for the Southern Border Joint Task Force, which was created after Trump first declared an invasion at the border upon entering office in January.
The new border militarization
Dan Maurer, an associate law professor at Ohio Northern University and U.S. Army veteran, says he sees the Trump administration’s use of terms like “invasion” as a way to justify using the military.
“It’s like, they have to escalate in order to satisfy the expectation that they've created by their rhetoric, very early on,” he said. “You call it an invasion, well, you treat it like an invasion, you put troops on the ground.”
Maurer, who also served in the Army’s legal advisory arm known as the JAG Corps, says the Trump administration is trying to sidestep the Posse Comitatus Act, which prohibits military involvement in domestic policing.
“Whether it’s the desert along the border, or whether it’s the city streets in LA, or at a detention center in Florida, the administration is conditioning the public to see this as a normal thing,” he said. “By putting these installations along the border — where we didn’t have installations before — they’ve militarized the border to such an extent that that is now like Fort Hood, Texas, or Fort Bragg, North Carolina.”
Maurer says seeing armored vehicles like Strykers near cities also alters how the public sees the military.
Living in that new reality is something Alma Angélica Macías Mejía is still trying to get used to. She runs a migrant shelter in Nogales, Sonora, where she lives. She says even though she has the legal documents to enter the U.S., she still gets scared crossing.
“We’re afraid of what they're going to ask us, what they’ll say, and whether they’ll let us through — we’ve seen the way others have been detained,” she said. “It feels like a war zone and you have to be alert, like your nerves are on edge trying to know what’s going on.”
Myles Traphagen, the researcher, says border militarization has long been a conversation for communities and rights activists.
“We’ve had border walls, we’ve had concertina wire, 25,000 Border Patrol agents, high intensity lighting, you know, functionally, it’s been militarized,” he said.
But, Traphagen says this time, it’s different. Now, vast stretches of the borderlands are under military control, hundreds of miles of land in three different states. That’s already changing for his research — recently, he says, he was told he had to remove his wildlife cameras from the military area in New Mexico. Though some areas are a mishmash of various state and private land, the majority of Arizona's roughly 370-mile long border with Mexico is either public land operated by the federal government, or tribal land.
“We’re seeing the process progress toward more and more land being taken off the table, taken away from the American public,” Traphagen said.
The Trump administration hasn’t said if more military zones are slated for other parts of the Arizona-Mexico border.
Nina Kravinsky contributed audio to this report.
EDITOR'S NOTE: Department of Defense officials clarified that the majority of detentions in New Mexico’s military zone were carried out by Border Patrol agents. Military personnel detained seven people.
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