Columbus, NM (AP) -Orange NO-Entry signs, which were published by the US military in English and Spanish dot in the desert in New Mexico, where a border wall comes past onion fields and savings ranches with high grass bushes past the vertebral brush and yucca trees.
The army has published thousands of warnings in New Mexico and West Texas and explained a “limited area by the authority of the commander”. It is part of a vast shift that the military has previously controlled to the border enforcement with Mexico.
The move sets long distances of the border under the supervision of the nearby military bases and enables the US troops to take people who illegally enter the country, to take the country and have a law that prohibits the military commitment to civil prosecution authorities. This is carried out under the authority of the national emergency at the border, which President Donald Trump explained on his first day of office.
The US authorities say that the zones are necessary to close gaps in the border enforcement and to facilitate in the wider fight against human smuggling networks and brutal drug cartels.
Militarization is contested in court and was criticized by civil rights lawyers, humanitarian auxiliary groups and outdoor enthusiasts who reject it to be blocked from public countries while troops are freely.
Abbey Carpenter, a leader of a search and rescue group for missing migrants, said that public access would be refused in desert sections in which migrant deaths have increased.
“Maybe there are more deaths, but we don’t know,” she said.
Military expansion
Two militarized zones form a buffer along 370 kilometers from Fort Hancock, Texas, over El Paso and Westward in the huge New Mexico Ranchlands.
The Department of Defense added an additional zone of 250 miles (400 kilometers) in Rio Grande Valley in Texas last week and plans another near Yuma, Arizona. Together, the zones will cover almost a third of the US line to Mexico.
They are patrolled by at least 7,600 members of the armed forces and the presence of the US government at the border is significantly expanded.
The response to the military buffer was mixed among the residents of the rural district of New Mexico, where a mighty culture of individual freedom is alleviated by the desire to pass through networks that bring migrants and smuggling goods across the border.
“We as a family have always supported the mission very much and supported border security,” said James Johnson, a fourth generation farmer, who supervised seasonal workers when they filled huge plastic boxes with onions and earned $ 22 per container.
Military missions among former presidents put “eyes and ears” on the border, said Johnson. This version is “tried to give some teeth”.
But some hunters and hikers fear that they are closed from a resilient and valued landscape.
“I don’t want to go down with my hunting rifle there and suddenly someone rolls me on me and says that I am in a military zone,” said Ray Trejo, coordinator of the New Mexico Wildlife Federation and representative of the Luna district. “I don’t know if these people were taught to de -escalate situations.”
Trejo, a former English teacher of the public school teacher for English language, said that military charges in an economy that is based on workers with a migration background seem inhumane.
“If the army, the border patrol, the law enforcement authorities generally determine people for reasons of transport, human smuggling, I have no problem,” he said. “But people come to our country to work and suddenly step into a military zone and they have no idea.”
Nicole Wieman, a spokesman for the Army Command, said the army negotiating possible public access to relaxation and hunting and will honor private rights to grazing and mining.
Increased punishment
More than 1,400 migrants were accused of having come on a military territory because they were raised a possible prison sentence of 18 months due to a first crime. This is in addition to an illegal admission of entry that is in custody for up to six months. After that, most are handed over to the US customs and border protection for the likely deportation. There were no obvious arrests from US citizens.
In a federal court in Las Cruces, New Mexico, on the banks of the Upper Rio Grande, migrants in the Drab County prison, which were submitted on a weekday before a judge.
A 29-year-old woman Guatemaltean tried to understand the instructions by a Spanish interpreter when she owed the illegal entry. A judge put aside due to a lack of evidence of military transitions, but sentenced them to two weeks in prison before being transferred to the probable deportation.
“She sells pottery, she is a very simple woman with an apprenticeship in the sixth grade,” a lawyer from the public defender told the judge. “She told me that she would go back and she will stay there.”
Border crossings
The arrests of border patrols along the southern border this year have decreased at the lowest level for six decades, including a decline by 30% in June compared to the previous month, as attempted intersections disappear. On June 28, the border patrol made only 137 arrests, a mighty contrast at the end of 2023, when the arrests had exceeded 10,000 on the busiest days.
The first militarized zones that were introduced in April and May extend west of El Paso to factories and cattle to partially circle the Grenzdorf Columbus in New Mexico and its 1,450 inhabitants. Here the Mexican revolutionary forces listed by the Pancho Villa went to a fatal attack from 1916 to the USA.
In an entrance harbor in Columbus, hundreds of children with US citizenship can now climb into public school buses and visit courses nearby every day from a bedroom community in Mexico.
The mayor of Columbus, Philip Skinner, a Republican, said that he had occasionally seen the military vehicle, but no evidence of disorders in an area in which illegal intersections were occasional.
“We didn’t adapt to this national policy,” said Skinner.
The supervision is divided between the commands of the US Army in Fort Bliss, Texas, and Fort Huachuca, Arizona. The militarized zones have implemented the POSSE Comitatus Act, a law of 1878 that prohibits the military to lead civilian law enforcement authorities on US floor.
Russell Johnson, a Rancher and former border protection officer, said that he welcomes the modern militarized zone in which his ranch borders on land, which was rented by the Bureau of Land Management.
“We have seen absolutely almost everything you can imagine what can happen at the border, and most of it is bad,” he said, remembering off-road vehicle hunts on his ranch and lifeless corpses that were recovered by Border Patrol.
At the end of April, he said, five armored military vehicles spent several days in a gap in the border wall, where the construction was hung at the beginning of the Biden presidency. But he said he hadn’t seen much of the military in the past few weeks.
“The only thing that has really changed is the small additional signage,” he said. “We don’t see the military presence here as expected.”
Judicial challenges
The federal public defense lawyers have questioned the modern supervision of the military in New Mexico and took the arrest of a Mexican man
They condemned the name of a modern military zone without the approval of the congress “for the sole purpose of enabling military measures on American soil” as “a question of the amazing and unprecedented political importance”. A judge did not decide on this topic.
In the meantime, the judicial challenges in the violation of charges in the militarized zone came about with a mixture of convictions and acquittal in the court proceedings.
Ryan Ellison, the supreme public prosecutor in New Mexico, was exceeded two immigrants in June, who came back into a militarized zone after a first warning. “There will be no topic whether they were aware of or not,” he said recently a press conference.
Rebecca Sheff Rebecca Sheff of the American Civil Liberties union tests a more punishable approach to the border enforcement with the modern military zones and the worries that it is expanded to expand the border.
“To the extent to which the federal government has the efforts to establish a much more enemy military presence along the border, this is a vehicle that you may be pushing … and that is very worrying,” she said.
