WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. military has created a second military zone along the border with Mexico, adding an area in Texas where troops can temporarily detain migrants or trespassers after doing the same in New Mexico.
President Donald Trump launched an aggressive immigration enforcement campaign after taking office, increasing troops at the southern border and pledging to deport millions of immigrants in the United States illegally.
The Trump administration earlier this month designated a 60-foot-wide (18.3-meter-wide) strip along a base in New Mexico as a "National Defense Area."
Late on Thursday, the U.S. military said that it had designated a second area along the border as the "Texas National Defense Area."
U.S. Customs and Border Protection maintains jurisdiction over illegal border crossings in the area and troops would hand over migrants they detained to U.S. Border Patrol or other civilian law enforcement, according to the Defense Department.
Eighty-two migrants have been charged for crossing into the buffer area. So far, U.S. troops have not detained any and it has been carried out by CBP officials.
The buffer zone allows the Trump administration to use troops to detain migrants without invoking the 1807 Insurrection Act that empowers a president to deploy the U.S. military to suppress events like civil disorder.
At the start of Trump administration, it had ordered the Pentagon and Department of Homeland Security to recommend whether actions, including the Insurrection Act of 1807, would be needed to deal with migrants.
A U.S. official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, told Reuters that U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth last week had recommended that at this time, the Insurrection Act was not needed.
The last time the Insurrection Act was invoked was during the 1992 Los Angeles riots.
Around 11,900 troops are currently deployed to the U.S. Southwest border where the number of migrants caught illegally crossing in March fell to the lowest level ever recorded, according to government data.
(Reporting by Idrees Ali, Phil Stewart and Andrew Hay; editing by Diane Craft)
