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Trump’s Use Of National Defense Resources To Protect The Border Is Legal And Brilliant

Securing 60 feet of federal dirt with the same trespassing law that protects Fort Bliss is not martial law.

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On Friday, the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel told the Pentagon it can chase illegal border crossers a few extra steps past a property line before losing the authority to grab them. That is the entire controversy in a sentence, and if you read the coverage this week, you’d think the Army was about to start running immigration checkpoints in Topeka. Deputy Assistant Attorney General William Hyde wrote that troops arresting trespassers just outside a National Defense Area does not violate the Posse Comitatus Act, given the “military purpose of a commander’s traditional protective power” over federal installations. I graduated from Marine Corps Officer Candidates School, and no officer I served with needed a law review article to explain that a commander secures his own perimeter. That’s basic doctrine, not a novel legal theory.

Here is the background the wire stories skip. On May 27, 1907, President Theodore Roosevelt reserved a 60-foot strip of land running along the Mexican border in California, Arizona, and New Mexico. He did it to stop opium smugglers and customs cheats, and to give federal officers a patrol corridor Congress hadn’t gotten around to funding properly. That strip is called the Roosevelt Reservation, and it has sat there quietly for over a century. Last year the Trump administration transferred segments of it, plus adjoining federal tracts, to Defense Department control and started calling the results National Defense Areas. There are now six of them across Arizona, California, New Mexico, and Texas, and Friday’s opinion lets the military designate more. The Pentagon has rotated in more than 20,000 troops to support the border mission since the effort began, a number that sounds like an occupation until you remember it’s spread across roughly a third of a 2,000-mile line and includes engineers, logistics staff, and surveillance crews, not just riflemen standing at checkpoints.

Simple Legal Mechanics

The legal mechanics are simpler than the outrage........

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