By Annie Linskey and Nancy A. Youssef

WASHINGTON -- President Trump authorized the U.S. military to take jurisdiction over a strip of public land at the border that spans three states, a key step toward having U.S. troops play a larger role enforcing immigration laws at the southern border.

In a presidential memorandum released Friday evening, Trump ordered the Defense Department to have authority over the Roosevelt Reservation, among other public lands. American-Indian reservations are exempt from the order.

"Our southern border is under attack from a variety of threats," Trump's order read. "The complexity of the current situation requires that our military take a more direct role in securing our southern border than in the recent past."

The move would ultimately mean that the military's massive budget can be more directly tapped for border security. The administration had been planning for weeks to transfer control of such lands to the military and potentially use the zone as a place to temporarily hold migrants who enter the U.S. illegally, according to defense officials. Many U.S. detention centers have been at their highest levels in years, creating a bottleneck for the White House goals of mass deportations.

The order released Friday, however, doesn't spell out that temporary detention facilities will be built on the lands.

The Roosevelt Reservation, which is referenced in the order, is a narrow strip of land along the border that goes through California, New Mexico and Arizona.

The order authorizes the military to construct a border barrier and install detection and monitoring equipment on the lands, according to the memo released Friday. The military's initial phase of activities will be assessed in 45 days.

Upon taking office, Trump quickly declared a national emergency at the southern border, rushing thousands of active-duty soldiers there. They arrived to join thousands of Texas National Guard members and state troopers deployed under a state disaster order, plus the thousands of agents permanently working for Border Patrol and other agencies.

Trump, who campaigned on cracking down on illegal immigration, inherited a border where unlawful crossings, after peaking at record levels in late 2023, had been steadily dropping for a year. Before he took office, such crossings had returned to the levels of the first Trump administration. Since then, they have fallen even lower.

During a lengthy cabinet meeting this week Trump had touted how illegal crossings have dipped significantly. "The numbers are incredible," Trump said Thursday, referring to the drop in crossings. "Where they used to have hundreds of thousands of people standing there, going through the border in Tijuana, Mexico -- this weekend they had nobody," he said.

Write to Annie Linskey at annie.linskey@wsj.com and Nancy A. Youssef at nancy.youssef@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

April 11, 2025 20:22 ET (00:22 GMT)

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