Project 2025 Tracker / What’s done, what’s next

5. Department of Homeland Security · Notable

Have DOD assist in aggressively building the southern border wall system

Partially done

166 5. Department of Homeland Security

“Department of Defense: Assist in aggressively building the border wall system on America's southern border.”

What has happened

  1. Partially done

    The Department's own one-year account of the mission is the closest thing to a barrier ledger it publishes, and it settles the row's test: DoD reinforces, DHS builds. "Over the past year, JTF-SB service members provided consistent watch across 1,954 miles of the U.S.-Mexico border… Nearly 6,000 signs and 2,000 buoys have been installed along 656 miles of the southern border to clearly demarcate the five recently created national defense areas. Over 51,000 rolls of concertina wire were delivered and are actively being emplaced into key areas in conjunction with CBP. This supports barrier reinforcement along the southern border, the largest of its kind in U.S. history." A photo caption in the same story has soldiers of the 642nd Engineer Support Company adding concertina wire "to an obstacle to reinforce the southern border **in an area without a barrier**" near Sunland Park, New Mexico. That is real, dated, in-window assistance by DoD engineers in support of CBP — the ask's verb is "assist", and this is assistance. It is not construction: across the whole article the words "wall" and "construct" each appear **zero** times, and no barrier mileage is claimed as built or funded by the Department. `partial` holds, now on the Department's own account rather than on NSPM-4 and the public land orders alone.

  2. Partially done

    Public Land Order 7963 withdrew about 109,651 acres of the Roosevelt Reservation in Dona Ana, Luna and Hidalgo Counties, New Mexico from the general land laws for three years and transferred administrative jurisdiction to the Department of the Army for border security purposes. That is the mechanism the memorandum called for actually in place: the corridor the border barrier runs along is now Army land, held for the purpose NSPM-4 defines. A second withdrawal, Public Land Order 7964, did the same for Yuma County, Arizona on 2025-07-25. It is `partial` rather than `done` because no allowlisted source found reports DoD building or funding barrier miles, and DHS continues to do the construction itself under its own IIRIRA section 102 waiver authority.

  3. Attempted

    National Security Presidential Memorandum-4 puts the Department of Defense into the border wall business by name. Section 1(a)(i) directs the Secretaries of Defense, the Interior, Agriculture and Homeland Security to provide for DoD use and jurisdiction over federal lands along the southern border, including the Roosevelt Reservation, that are reasonably necessary to enable military activities “including border-barrier construction and emplacement of detection and monitoring equipment”. On that date it had moved no land and built nothing.

Research log

What was searched, and what didn’t count as evidence

Research notes

The DHS side of the wall is not this ask and is not counted here: DHS published 34 section 102 waiver determinations over the window (Federal Register full-text search for “physical barriers and roads”), the first on 2025-04-08, and none of them mentions the Department of Defense. #452 (use active-duty military and National Guard to secure the border) is the major ask on the same page and is done on the same National Defense Area sequence read for a different purpose.

  • NSPM-4 read in full at https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/04/military-mission-for-sealing-the-southern-border-of-the-united-states-and-repelling-invasions/; the quoted phrase is section 1(a)(i).
  • Public Land Order 7963’s operative text read at https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2025-04-21/html/2025-06827.htm.
  • Reviewed 2026-09-03: the finding holds. The Department’s sites (war.gov and media.defense.gov) can be read in full. What was swept: the Department’s five news feeds — news stories, press releases, speeches, transcripts and one other content type — 500 items each, 2,505 items in all, running to 2026-09-02 at the near end (press releases back to 2024-12-30, news stories to 2026-01-05, speeches as far back as 2014), searched by title and description for border, barrier, wall, miles and Roosevelt Reservation. There is no release announcing DoD-built or DoD-funded barrier miles: no wall segment, no construction contract, no mileage of primary or secondary fence. The only “barrier” hits in all 2,505 items are an AI-development story and a road-march description. What the Department reports is five national defense areas established and demarcated, concertina wire emplaced with CBP, a joint task force, a Mexican Border Defense Medal (2026-07-27), an FAA–DoW safety agreement (2026-04-10) and counter-UAS work (2026-04-02).
  • How far that negative reaches: the Department’s own newsroom across all five content types. It does not reach contract awards — usaspending.gov, whose pages need a browser to read, was not searched, and its data service was not queried — so a USACE construction contract could in principle exist without a press release. That is the one search left before done could be considered.
  • DHS’s 2026-08-05 release on the Secretary’s border tour (read) reports 9.5 of a 17-mile buoy barrier deployed at Brownsville and names no DoD role.
Action
expand
Object
southern border wall system construction
ID
451