In arguing for “a creative and aggressive approach” to border patrol, Project 2025 suggested the possible “use of active-duty military personnel and National Guardsmen to assist in arrest operations along the border—something that has not yet been done.”
The Trump administration has done just that, designating strips of land along the border as extensions of military bases, among other actions.
On his first day in office, Trump declared a national emergency at the southern border and issued an executive order “clarifying” the use of the military to protect the “territorial integrity” of the U.S., giving him broad powers to unilaterally direct more federal funding and resources to border security.
A day after the national emergency was declared, Acting Secretary of Defense Robert Salesses met with top military officials to develop plans to implement Trump’s directive, which included sending 1,500 active-duty service members to San Diego and El Paso, Texas. (At the time, there were about 2,500 U.S. National Guard members and Reserves at the border, but there were no active-duty members.)
“This is just the beginning,” Salesses said in a Jan. 22 statement. “In short order, the Department will develop and execute additional missions in cooperation with DHS, federal agencies, and state partners to address the full range of threats outlined by the President at our nation’s borders.”
A day later, Gen. Steven Nordhaus, chief of the National Guard Bureau, said that the guard “is increasing its support and closely coordinating emergent requirements with USNORTHCOM and U.S. Transportation Command for additional personnel, military airlift, barrier construction and other capabilities to meet Presidential and Secretary of Defense directives.”
Since then, the Trump administration has significantly escalated military use to help crackdown on illegal immigration at the border and in the interior of the U.S., and drug smuggling via boats.
In March, the Defense Department activated a Joint Task Force-Southern Border to help ICE with transportation maintenance and operations, including air support, and detection and monitoring of “suspicious activity,” among other things.
The Joint Task Force-Southern Border established four National Defense Areas in Arizona, New Mexico and Texas “to protect the U.S. southern border from unlawful entry,” according to the U.S. Northern Command. The four zones span approximately 515 miles along the southern border, a spokesperson for the Northern Command told us in an email.
“[T]he National Defense Areas are slim, noncontiguous extensions of existing military bases,” a task force spokesperson said in an email. “In the case of the New Mexico National Defense Area, the land width ranges from 60 feet to a mile across approximately 170 noncontiguous miles.”
After Trump issued a memo in April on guidance to the Defense Department on “sealing” the border and “repelling invasions,” the U.S. Northern Command authorized soldiers in the New Mexico National Defense Area to search and detain trespassers “until an appropriate law enforcement entity can assume custody.”
Mark Nevitt, an associate professor at Emory University School of Law, wrote in April that turning “a strip of federal land along the U.S. southern border into a massive ‘National Defense Area’” effectively bypasses the Posse Comitatus Act, which “prohibits federal military forces from being used in a law enforcement capacity.”
There is an exception to the Posse Comitatus Act known as the “military purpose doctrine,” Elizabeth Goitein and Joseph Nunn at the Brennan Center for Justice wrote in April.
“The doctrine, conceived by the executive branch and endorsed by the courts, holds that an action taken primarily to further a military purpose does not violate the Posse Comitatus Act even if it provides an incidental benefit to civilian law enforcement,” they wrote.
The border task force totals 7,600 active-duty personnel, including 250 who regularly patrol the southwest border, the Defense Department official said.
The Justice Department has filed trespassing charges against hundreds of migrants, but a federal judge in May dismissed cases for about 100 defendants because they did not knowingly enter military property. “[T]he United States provides no facts from which one could reasonably conclude that the Defendant knew he was entering the NMNDA,” the judge wrote.
In July, Trump signed a reconciliation bill that provided “$1 billion to support military activities at the southern border, including the temporary detention of migrants on DoD installations and operating and building infrastructure in ‘national defense areas,’” the Federal News Network wrote.
As for the National Guard, there is a long history of the guard being deployed to the southern border, including under Presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Joe Biden and Trump during his first term.
But in his second term, Trump expanded his use of the National Guard beyond the border. In May, DHS requested 20,000 National Guard troops to help with the president’s crackdown on illegal immigration in the interior of the country — not at the southern border – to comply with Trump’s “mandate from the American people to arrest and deport criminal illegal aliens.”
In response, the Defense Department has asked 20 states – all run by Republican governors – to activate National Guard troops to support ICE operations, according to several news reports.
The governors of Tennessee and Wyoming were among the first to activate National Guard troops to help ICE, while the governor of Vermont declined the Defense Department’s request.
The guard members were activated under Title 32 status, which means they would “fall under the command and control of their state or territory governor, but their duty is federally funded and regulated,” as explained in a fact sheet on National Guard duty statuses.
The Christian Science Monitor wrote that experts “aren’t aware of prior use of the National Guard under what’s called Title 32 status to assist ICE in the nation’s interior.”
Chris Mirasola, an assistant law professor at the University of Houston Law Center, told the Christian Science Monitor that the decision is a “serious escalation” in the use of National Guard troops for immigration enforcement.
Trump’s crackdown at the southern border appears to have significantly reduced the number of people trying to cross the border illegally. The U.S. Border Patrol, which is responsible for illegal entries between ports of entry, reported 49,620 enforcement encounters at the southwest border from February through August, down 93% from the same seven-month period in 2024.
The military has also been used to work with the U.S. Coast Guard on drug interdiction missions in the Gulf and carrying out deadly air strikes on Venezuelan boats in the Caribbean that the administration said were transporting drugs.
(Style note: On Sept. 5, Trump issued an executive order to rebrand the Defense Department as the “Department of War.” A formal name change would require an act of Congress, so the president’s order directed federal agencies to use the “secondary Department of War designation” when referring to the Department of Defense.)
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