The Maria Sacchetti, Jeremy Roebuck, Dan Lamothe · The Washington Post (c) 2025
The Justice Department has begun the first criminal prosecutions of migrants who breach a newly expanded military zone at the southern border that is patrolled by U.S. troops, threatening people with additional penalties for crossing the U.S.-Mexico border illegally.
At least 28 migrants were charged Monday with crossing into the 170-mile-long “National Defense Area,” a 60-foot strip of land that stretches across the bottom of New Mexico and has effectively been turned into part of a U.S. military installation. Prosecutors added the new charge of violating security regulations in U.S. District Court in Las Cruces to the more common misdemeanor of entering the United States illegally.
Both crimes are punishable by a year or less in prison. But Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said during a visit to the border in New Mexico last week that migrants could face more prison time for illegal crossings. Standing on a dusty stretch along the border Friday, he held up signs he said were being posted in English and Spanish warning migrants against entering the military zone.
“You cross our border illegally, you will see them,” he said of the signs, wearing olive drab and a baseball cap and speaking to cameras in footage later posted to the Defense Department’s X account. “It’s clearly posted. And when you ignore them, you will be prosecuted.”
Hegseth said Friday that he met the U.S. attorney in New Mexico, Ryan Ellison, and that the prosecutor “can’t wait” to begin charging those who cross into the area. Spokespeople for Ellison’s office and the Justice Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the new charges.
Details on the initial charges filed are sparse in court records, but the allegations mirror the routes that migrants have traversed for years, with people stumbling into the area around Doña Ana County. Instead of being charged only with one count of “illegal entry without inspection,” they now face a second charge: “penalty for violation of security regulations.”
The defense-related charge alleges that migrants “willfully violated the order issued on April 18, 2025, by the U.S. Army Garrison Fort Huachuca military commander designating the New Mexico National Defense Areas, also known as the Roosevelt Reservation, as both a restricted area and a controlled area under Army Regulation 190-13,” which prohibits unauthorized entry.
Fort Huachuca is in Arizona, where a military unit known as Joint Task Force-Southern Border has its headquarters and is overseeing the military buildup across much of the border.
The Trump administration has surged thousands of troops and armored Stryker combat vehicles to the southern border in Hegseth’s goal to obtain “100 percent” operational control of the boundary with Mexico. The transfer of the 60-foot-wide Roosevelt Reservation land from the Interior Department to the Defense Department expanded the Pentagon’s authorities to patrol the land, allowing U.S. troops to temporarily detain migrants they encounter rather than simply calling law enforcement authorities.
Hegseth has said the goal is to curb illegal border crossings and to stop the flow of illegal drugs, though most such drugs are smuggled in through legal ports of entry.
Defense officials had said the plan was for U.S. troops to temporarily hold migrants rather than detain them. After President Donald Trump approved the plan for the national defense area earlier this month, however, defense officials shifted language, saying they will temporarily detain migrants. A defense official familiar with the issue, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue, said there’s no fundamental difference, but defense officials initially used “hold” to indicate their role will be narrow in scope.
The Trump administration has pledged mass deportations of “millions” of people in the first year of the president’s second term, with the goal of removing at least 1 million of the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants, though experts say he is unlikely to reach that benchmark, in part because of lower border crossings.
U.S. Border Patrol apprehensions of migrants crossing illegally sank to 7,000 in March after Trump took office, the fewest since at least 2000, according to the Migration Policy Institute, a think tank in Washington. Shortly after taking office, Trump declared the nation was under an “invasion” and dispatched 10,000 military troops to the border. Trump’s actions have drawn criticism from immigrant rights groups that say he has further curtailed access to asylum and other humanitarian protections.
The American Civil Liberties Union of New Mexico said the military’s expanded powers allow service members to “detain civilians, conduct physical searches, implement crowd control measures, and assist with barrier installation” in the New Mexico National Defense Area.
Rebecca Sheff, senior staff attorney at the ACLU of New Mexico, said in a statement last week that the expansion “represents a dangerous erosion of the constitutional principle that the military should not be policing civilians.”
“By authorizing service members to detain, search, and conduct ‘crowd control,’ these new authorities undermine our state’s values of dignity, respect, and community,” she said. “We don’t want militarized zones where border residents – including U.S. citizens – face potential prosecution simply for being in the wrong place.”
She compared the New Mexico effort to a state border security program in Texas thatalso seeks to expand criminal charges against people who cross illegally, calling it “Texas’s Operation Lone Star on steroids.”
Hegseth visited the border while under increasing scrutiny for national security breaches, including his use of the commercial messaging app Signal to share classified information. In a recent interview with the Atlantic, Trump acknowledged the concern over the defense secretary.
“I think he’s gonna get it together,” Trump said of Hegseth in the interview last week. “I had a talk with him, a positive talk, but I had a talk with him.”
On the border, Hegseth said migrants may face an array of criminal charges for breaching the military zone. Anyone who saws through a border fence could be charged with destruction of government property, he said, and if someone flees, that person could be charged with evading law enforcement.
“You add up the charges of what you can be charged with, misdemeanors and felonies, you could be looking up to 10 years in prison when prosecuted,” he said.
He said troops were working with homeland security agencies to arrest migrants, giving an incorrect name for Customs and Border Protection (he called it Customs and Border Patrol) and incorrectly saying the nation “had an invasion of 21 million people” under President Joe Biden.
Apprehensions under Biden averaged 2 million a year for the first three years of his administration, and more than 3 million people were released into the U.S. Others were expelled into Mexico or deported.
In addition to the new charges, Trump has ordered active-duty troops, weapons and technology to the southern border, including dispatching two Navy destroyers to aid the mission at sea. Trump also has sought to expand migrant detention at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba.
Earlier this month, two U.S. service members were killed in a vehicle rollover in New Mexico and another was hospitalized in critical condition, U.S. defense officials said. They were on a reconnaissance mission to improve the military’s familiarity with the border and were the first known military fatalities associated with Trump’s expanded border crackdown.
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Aaron Schaffer contributed to this report.