Judge Dismisses ‘Trespassing’ Charges Promoted by Trump in Border ‘Defense Area’...NYT
Molly Molloy
Judge Dismisses ‘Trespassing’ Charges Promoted by Trump in Border ‘Defense Area’
A newly designated “military installation” that stretches the length of the frontier in New Mexico has made trespassing a novel criminal charge at the border, bringing turmoil to the state. A judge says migrants couldn’t know they were trespassing.
By Jack HealyLeo Dominguez and Seamus Hughes
Photographs by Paul Ratje
Reporting from the U.S.-Mexico border in New Mexico
- May 15, 2025Updated 3:18 p.m. ET
A federal judge this week dismissed charges against nearly 100 migrants detained under a Trump administration effort to arrest undocumented migrants for trespassing on a newly declared “national defense” zone along New Mexico’s border with Mexico.
The order from a federal magistrate judge, Gregory B. Wormuth, added to the confusion and legal turmoil that have gripped New Mexico in the month since President Trump declared a ribbon of land along the 180-mile length of the state’s southern border to be an Army base.
Around 400 migrants had been charged with willfully violating security regulations — misdemeanor charges that can carry up to a year in jail. The arrests, which Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth was praising just last Friday, had swamped local jails and every day brought dozens of shackled migrants into a federal courtroom to face the novel charges.
“When you cross illegally, you will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law,” Mr. Hegseth said in a social media message.
But Judge Wormuth, a former federal prosecutor, said the federal government had failed to show that the migrants actually knew they were unlawfully entering a restricted military area. He has dismissed charges against 98 migrants so far as he works through the docket.
“The United States provides no facts from which one could reasonably conclude that the Defendant knew he was entering” the New Mexico National Defense Area, the newly declared military installation, Judge Wormuth ruled.
The New Mexico National Defense Area [map]
Source: Bureau of Land Management
By Daniel Wood
Defense lawyers said some migrants were arrested before the government put up signs warning that the area was restricted. Others crossed between signs, arrived exhausted in the dark or were unable to read the warnings, lawyers said.
“It’s just a bunch of desert,” said Carlos Ibarra, a defense lawyer. “They’re just coming over the same as usual, and all of a sudden, it’s military charges. Nobody knows what’s going on.”
Judge Wormuth appeared to agree, dismissing many of the charges in a flurry of orders issued late on Wednesday. Nearly identical charges against hundreds of other migrants could also soon be thrown out, given what the judge described as the prosecution’s “cut-and-paste approach to factual allegations.”
On Thursday, Judge Wormuth took the bench in Las Cruces to consider military trespassing charges against a new group of 22 migrants who were waiting for their first hearing. Over the objections of prosecutors, he said he did not find probable cause — a basic legal hurdle.
The migrants in these cases still face misdemeanor charges of entering the United States illegally, and are likely to face deportation. They are all being held without bond. Federal prosecutors also have the option of appealing the judge’s dismissal or filing the charges again, with additional facts to make a case that the migrants had willfully trespassed when they crossed the border and stepped onto a 60-foot-wide strip of federal land known as the Roosevelt Reservation.
“If the government has the evidence to support the charges, they’re welcome to refile,” said Amanda Skinner, an assistant federal defender who filed a brief last week challenging the charges. “We’ve been convinced there was no probable cause.”
The U.S. attorney’s office in New Mexico and the Justice Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the dismissals.
The judge’s ruling did not address the larger questions that have swirled through the heavily Democratic state of New Mexico since the Trump administration began expanding its legal powers and military presence on the southwestern border.
Since the new military area was established, volunteers who scour the desert for the remains of perished migrants have started to worry that they could be arrested. Hikers determined to traverse the storied, 3,100-mile Continental Divide Trail to Canada face legal uncertainties, since their trek begins or ends at the border. Hunters who frequent the wide-open public lands in the area are worried about running into active-duty troops when they are out stalking quail or white-tailed deer.
“Imagine me hunting in the mountains, and some Army guys see me in camouflage with a gun,” said Ray Trejo, a Democratic commissioner of Luna County, which sits along the border. “The administration didn’t think this through.”
The military zone has drawn praise from conservative farmers and politicians in the area, who credit the president with restoring calm. State Senator Anthony Thornton, a Republican from outside Albuquerque, hailed Mr. Trump’s military maneuvers as a “brilliant solution” to fight drug trafficking and human smuggling.
While active-duty troops have the power to detain migrants on military land, they have largely been providing support and surveillance to help Border Patrol agents make arrests.
Maj. Geoffrey A. Carmichael, a spokesman for the Joint Task Force Southern Border, said military personnel had not detained anyone so far in the administration’s newly declared “national defense areas” along the southern border. He said they had helped detect more than 150 “unauthorized trespassers.” In response to the case dismissals of migrants the military helped apprehend, Major Carmichael said that the task force’s authority ends “where the U.S. Border Patrol’s law enforcement responsibilities begin,” and that adjudication was the responsibility of the Department of Justice, not the Department of Defense.
Still, critics said they were uneasy about thousands of active-duty troops and armored combat vehicles patrolling American soil so close to home.
“It’s beginning to feel like an occupation,” said Sarah Silva, a Democratic state representative from Las Cruces. “It’s putting people on edge.”
In April, the Trump administration declared the border strip would be treated as an extension of the Fort Huachuca Army base in eastern Arizona.
But the Army has ended up taking jurisdiction over at least 170 square miles of public lands — far more than some in New Mexico had anticipated. At some points, the new defense area appears to stretch three miles into the United States, far exceeding the original 60-foot corridor, according to estimates from local officials.
The federal government recently added to that footprint by creating a second military installation that extends 50 miles from Fort Bliss in El Paso.
Local officials said they were still unsure where the military’s authority now began and ended in the unmarked vastness of the Southwest’s open, public spaces.
“What is the current public access status of the lands?” Senator Martin Heinrich, a New Mexico Democrat, asked in a letter to Mr. Hegseth on Wednesday. “Are these areas now closed to public entry, or are they still accessible to U.S. citizens?”
The Bureau of Land Management has said it would work with the Army to allow miners or farmers with grazing leases to continue using the land. But Major Carmichael said that recreational users like hunters and hikers were no longer allowed, and humanitarian aid groups could not operate without permission.
The federal government has started to mark the area by planting “Restricted Area” signs every few hundred feet near the border. The signs, in Spanish and English, warn people that they could be stopped and searched, and forbid photography and note taking.
But most of the signs face only one way: toward the border, in the direction of arriving migrants. They were not readily visible to anyone coming from the north. A popular mapping and navigation app used by hunters, called OnX, still marks the area as being part of the Bureau of Land Management, not the Defense Department.
Outside the tiny border village of Columbus, James Johnson, whose family has farmed the area for a century, said he supported Mr. Trump’s immigration crackdown and the surge of personnel to the area. Migrants crossing his land have pulled down fences and broken pipes to find water, he said. Now the area feels more secure.
“I haven’t seen much of a military presence,” he said, adding, “but the Border Patrol is actually doing what they’re supposed to be doing, patrolling the border.”
So far, no American citizens appear to have been arrested and charged with trespassing in the military areas.
But the federal court in Las Cruces, which handles border-related offenses, had been inundated with undocumented defendants before the judge began dismissing cases. While border crossings are down sharply, public defenders said the legal system in New Mexico was facing an onslaught of cases because federal prosecutors were criminally charging nearly every person apprehended along the border rather than turning them back to Mexico.
The authorities were having trouble finding enough jail beds, defense lawyers said — an issue not likely to be immediately resolved despite the judge’s dismissal of some of the trespassing charges.
Jack Healy is a Phoenix-based national correspondent who focuses on the fast-changing politics and climate of the Southwest. He has worked in Iraq and Afghanistan and is a graduate of the University of Missouri’s journalism school.
Leo Dominguez is a graphics and multimedia editor at The Times who produces visual stories. He also reports for the National section, with a focus on immigration and the American south.
https://www.abqjournal.com/news/article_2fc2968b-b8af-4cb2-bf86-f14d2bd89db5.html#Echobox=1746980902
Hundreds of migrants arrested after entering military area at NM border
- By Colleen Heild / Journal Investigative Reporter
- May 11, 2025 Updated May 11, 2025
Another 209 people were arrested last week in southern New Mexico after entering the newly established New Mexico National Defense Area along the U.S.-Mexico border. Where they end up could soon be decided by the state’s chief U.S. Magistrate judge.
Traditionally, individuals would face illegal entry charges, but now they are also subject to additional charges of entering a restricted military area and violating a defense property security regulation as part of the Trump administration’s enhanced immigration enforcement. That means up to an additional 18 months of incarceration, if convicted of the two misdemeanors.
“To allow this novel charging theory runs the risk of supporting the Government’s attempt to strike a foul blow against undocumented immigrants,” wrote assistant federal public defender Amanda Skinner, of the Federal Public Defender’s Office in New Mexico, in a filing last week in U.S. District Court in New Mexico.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office in New Mexico has contended that it doesn’t matter if an individual knew he or she was entering a prohibited military zone, as long as the person understood he or she were crossing illegally into the United States. A USAO spokesperson would not say where the 209 migrants are being detained as they await resolution of their cases.
“Most aliens who enter the District of New Mexico from Mexico through an area that is not a designated port of entry ... and thereby enter the (restricted military area) without authorization — are not ‘engaged in apparently innocent conduct,’” federal prosecutors wrote in a May 5 court filing.
Typically, unless there are other charges, those convicted of the misdemeanor of illegal entry without inspection are given time served and deported.
On April 15, the U.S. Department of Interior transferred to the U.S. Army more than 109,651 acres of federal land along the U.S. border in New Mexico, including a 60-foot-wide strip along the Mexican border in Doña Ana, Luna and Hidalgo counties. That enabled the Secretary of the Army to designate the area as the New Mexico National Defense Area and issue a security regulation to formally prohibit any unauthorized entry onto the land.
In the past several weeks, an estimated 300 or so cases have been filed in New Mexico that have also included the trespassing on military property, including 209 such cases in the week that ended Friday, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.
Skinner wrote in her filing that her agency “immediately” brought to the government’s and the court’s attention that the additional charges “are unsupported by probable cause.” On April 30, the federal public defender asked that all such charges be dismissed, but chief U.S. Magistrate Judge Gregory Wormuth of Las Cruces denied the motion.
A day later, Wormuth filed an order asking both sides to detail what proof would be necessary for a conviction on the two misdemeanor charges related to trespassing on military property.
In her filing Thursday, Skinner included a sworn affidavit from an investigator with her agency who toured the defense area May 7 with the U.S. Border Patrol. Investigator Horlando Lopez stated that he saw signs attached to stakes in the ground on the military land, but wasn’t permitted to photograph them or their locations.
The 12-by-18-inch signs warned that the area was restricted military property and that unauthorized entry was prohibited. But the words, in both Spanish and English, were not visible from the border wall, which appeared to be about 20-feet tall, Lopez’s affidavit stated. The signs were spaced about 200 to 300 feet apart from each other and seemed to be more than 60 feet away from the border wall, he added. He said he didn’t see any lighting in the area.
Lopez wrote that it appeared to him that someone could scale the border wall in the space between two signs, walk straight into the desert and never see a sign.
“Considering the placement of the signs, even if a migrant saw and read a sign, he or she would have already crossed through and exited the military land,” Lopez stated.
Skinner wrote that she also toured the area and it was “readily apparent...that the location of the signage is wholly inadequate to inform anyone approaching the alleged military land from either side of the border that they are entering the space prior to entering it.”
She asked Wormuth to hold a hearing so attorneys for both sides “may be questioned as to their positions and to develop a complete record on these emerging and important legal issues.” Absent proof that defendants willfully violated a military regulation and entered military property with a prohibited purpose or with knowledge the entry was prohibited, “this Court cannot allow the Government to continue to prosecute (the military property-related) charges.”
The U.S. Attorney Office says offenders by law don’t need to see posted warning signs or know they were violating the no-trespassing edict in order to be found guilty.
“If an illegal alien enters the U.S. from Mexico without going through a designated port of entry and knows that such conduct is unlawful, then he or she has violated the military regulation, even if he or she never saw a sign designating the area as restricted, never knew he or she was entering military property, was unaware the military had restricted entries onto this property, and didn’t specifically intend to violate the security regulation,” stated the government’s filing.
The government, nonetheless, has posted about 199 signs along the 180-mile border with Mexico, and says placement of the signs “in light of the often difficult and unforgiving desert and mountainous terrain” is “conspicuous and appropriate.” The federal government “is currently working on installing additional signs,” the U.S. Attorney’s Office filing added.
Colleen Heild is an investigative reporter. She also writes about CYFD and Federal courts. You can reach her at che...@abqjournal.com.
Molly Molloy
Judge dismisses charges for migrants accused of trespassing on military zone
A federal judge found no probable cause to believe that the migrants knew they were entering a military zone and thus “willfully” trespassed onto land the Trump administration declared “national security areas.”
A federal judge has ordered criminal charges dismissed for dozens of migrants accused of trespassing on military property after the Trump administration turned much of the southern border of New Mexico into a military zone.
U.S. Magistrate Judge Gregory B. Wormuth found no probable cause to believe that the migrants knew they were entering a military zone and thus “willfully” trespassed. Wormuth dismissed trespassing charges against 22 migrants who made their initial court appearances on Thursday, but they still face illegal entry charges. The judge has dismissed charges related to trespassing against more than 100 migrants so far.
“Requiring an intentional entry means that the defendant must know they were entering the military property,” Wormuth wrote in one such order issued on Wednesday, dismissing charges without prejudice. “Indeed, not requiring knowledge of entry would again lead to absurd and unfair results. For example, an individual, knowing they were prohibited from entering a military base, who steps on land he does not know is part of that base would be guilty without having any culpable intent.”
The Pentagon declined to comment and referred questions to the Department of Homeland Security and the Justice Department.
“We acknowledge and respect the judge’s authority to determine probable cause,” Amanda Skinner, an assistant federal public defender, said in a statement to The Washington Post. “This was the right result under the law.”
Wormuth’s sweeping dismissal of trespassing charges is the latest development in a legal battle that has ensued since the Defense Department earlier this month transformed a 60-foot-wide strip of borderland along most of the southern boundary of New Mexico, as well as parts of the border in West Texas, into “national defense areas.” The designation enabled U.S. troops to detain migrants and for officials to be able to charge them with trespassing on military property.
More than 200 migrants were subsequently charged with at least two crimes, for unauthorized entry into the United States and onto a military installation. Some also faced an additional charge.
Shortly after the migrants were charged, Wormuth asked government lawyers to submit a brief explaining, in their view, the legal standards required to convict someone of trespassing on military property.
“As with all criminal offenses, the government must establish that a defendant possesses the requisite mens rea,” Wormuth wrote then, referring to the Latin term for the defendant’s state of mind and the requirement for most federal crimes that prosecutors prove the defendant intended to break the law. “The scarcity of case law relating to these offenses, particularly given the unprecedented nature of prosecuting such offenses in this factual context, leaves the Court unclear about the mens rea standard as applied in these cases.”
Wormuth reiterated in court documents on Wednesday that, to be found guilty, defendants must have known that the property they trespassed on is under military control and restricted from the public and that the migrants intended to violate the rules anyway.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced the expanded prosecutions in April during a visit to New Mexico as part of the Trump administration’s quest to obtain “100 percent” operational control of the border, where illegal crossings have plunged since Inauguration Day. But defense lawyers say the criminal charges are excessive because most migrants were unaware that the rugged and remote terrain they crossed into had recently been transformed into military territory.
Government lawyers have said the government has posted 199 signs along New Mexico’s southern border in English and Spanish alerting people not to enter the area. The signs say that the area is restricted property and that all people who enter may be detained and searched. The signs do not warn people that they could be prosecuted for trespassing.
Defense lawyers said it is unclear whether migrants who have been charged could even see the signs.
“People have no idea they are committing this new offense,” Rosanne Camunez, a defense attorney, told The Post earlier this month.
Migrants charged have told law enforcement they are from mostly Spanish-speaking countries, but some were from Turkey, where the main language is Turkish, and Pakistan, where the official language is Urdu.
Maria Sacchetti and Dan Lamothe contributed to this report.
Molly Molloy
From: René Kladzyk <rene.k...@gmail.com>
Date: Fri, May 16, 2025 at 8:43 AM
Subject: Re: [frontera-list] Judge Dismisses ‘Trespassing’ Charges Promoted by Trump in Border ‘Defense Area’...NYT
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