Fwd: One year in, new NM militarized border zone overwhelming courts, ACLU says -Source New Mexico
Molly Molloy
The "Invisible" Military Bases At the Border
Steps Congress can take to protect civil liberties in the borderlands
Document Date: April 21, 2026
ACLU says Congress needs to intervene to prevent further ‘overreach’
BY: PATRICK LOHMANN-APRIL 21, 2026 4:30 PM
United States soldiers ride on a truck May 21, 2025, carrying a sign demarcating the boundary of the new militarized border zone established along New Mexico’s shared border with Mexico. (Photo courtesy U.S. Army Cpl. Jerron Bruce/DVIDS)
One year after U.S. Department of War Secretary Pete Hegseth announced a land swap in southern New Mexico would create a new national militarized zone to deter illegal border crossers, federal courts are swamped with thousands of criminal cases the government knows it cannot prove, according to a new report from the American Civil Liberties Union of New Mexico.
On April 15, 2025, Hegseth and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum announced the transfer of land from the U.S. Bureau of Land Management to the military, effectively making the 180-mile border New Mexico shares with Mexico into an extended military base tied to Fort Huachuca in Arizona.
Along with increasing Army patrols and empowering the military a more direct role in securing the border, creating the zone also enabled federal prosecutors to impose misdemeanor charges on those caught in the new National Defense Area.
In the year since, according to the ACLU’s report released Tuesday, federal prosecutors in New Mexico have filed misdemeanor charges more than 2,000 times. But judges have tossed out many of those cases, saying the government did not establish that those charged “knowingly” entered the new military zone, and issued rulings criticizing prosecutors for continuing to bring the charges.
“The Government’s inattention to statutory and constitutional rights has been a consistent throughline through these hundreds of cases,” wrote U.S. District Court Judge Margaret Strickland in one such ruling the ACLU excerpted for its report.
That prosecutors continue to file the charges remains a mystery, said Becca Sheff, staff attorney for the ACLU, in an interview Tuesday with Source NM.
“What has prompted us to persist in monitoring this so closely and analyzing its implications is really the puzzle of why the government has persisted…pushing these military trespass charges because, frankly, they’re not getting a lot of bang for their buck at this time,” she said. “And it raises the question of, what’s the broader policy objective?”
A spokesperson for the United States Attorney’s Office of New Mexico did not immediately respond to Source NM’s request Tuesday afternoon for comment on the ACLU report.
The organization’s findings echo those from a recent investigation by ProPublica and the Texas Tribune, which found that about 60% of cases involving at least 4,700 immigrants were dropped or dismissed, and that at least nine judges in New Mexico and West Texas, where another militarized border zone is in effect, have deemed the government’s charges legally deficient.
The ACLU report notes that federal prosecutors whose cases judges dismissed resorted to a new way of filing charges against immigrants arrested in the National Defense Area. Instead of securing indictments through grand juries or presenting cases to a magistrate judge for a review, prosecutors filed criminal “informations,” which the ACLU says are typically reserved for minor violations and don’t require a judge’s review.
“The audacity that the government’s shown so far in circumventing the court’s process for evaluating whether charges are valid at the preliminary stage of the case has been really egregious,” Sheff told Source NM.
The ACLU’s report urges Congress to exercise oversight over the border zones, including determining whether prosecutors are violating federal policy by filing criminal “informations” against defendants.
The ACLU also wants Congress to assess how much money and manpower federal prosecutors have devoted to enforcing the militarized border zone, as well the burdens it has placed on federal public defenders.
Sheff said her organization did legal research and statistical analysis of the charges being in militarized zones across the border, which pointed toward the ACLU toward recommendations for additional transparency, oversight and “legal reform to put in place more meaningful safeguards against this type of overreach.”
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