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

5. Department of Homeland Security · Major

Use active-duty military and National Guard to secure the border

Done

167 5. Department of Homeland Security

“of America's borders, including using military personnel and hardware to prevent illegal crossings between ports of entry and channel all cross-border traffic to legal ports of entry.”

Printed again in Chapter 17.

555 17. Department of Justice

“This could include use of active-duty military personnel and National Guardsmen to assist in arrest operations along the border—something that has not yet been done.”

What has happened

  1. Done

    The deployment is a year old and continuing, and the Department's own anniversary account is the Primary the round-1 pass could not open. Joint Task Force–Southern Border stood up 2025-03-14 under U.S. Northern Command with the 10th Mountain Division and passed to the 101st Airborne Division on 2025-10-10. In its first year more than 20,000 service members served under it, watching 1,954 miles of border; it conducted about 22,000 enhanced detection and monitoring missions, of which almost 3,000 were joint patrols with Customs and Border Protection agents and over 800 mirrored patrols with the Mexican Secretariat of National Defense, plus more than 84,000 security site missions and nearly 1,600 aerial observation flights; and nearly 6,000 signs and 2,000 buoys were installed along the 656 miles covered by the five national defense areas. The Chapter 17 Quote's National Guard limb is answered on the Department's own record too: addressing the adjutants general on 2026-02-25 the Secretary of War said the Guard "has been instrumental in establishing 100% operational control of our southern border" and that "since January 2025, more than 18,000 National Guardsmen have supported operations on the southern border". Neither document states the Guardsmen's duty status, so whether those are Title 10 or Title 32 orders is still not established; what the round-1 note left open — that the Guard's border role was unsourced on an allowlisted host — is now closed.

  2. Done

    Interior transferred about 109,651 acres of the New Mexico border strip to the Army for three years (Public Land Order 7963, effective 2025-04-15), creating the first National Defense Area; further withdrawals followed for Yuma, AZ (07-25, 09-11) and San Diego/Imperial, CA (12-15). **The detention authority is now on the Department's own record rather than on NPR's.** Its news account of the Secretary's 2025-04-25 visit to the New Mexico NDA states that the area was designated on 2025-04-18 by a general order of the Secretary of the Army making it part of Fort Huachuca, that until then "only CBP personnel could apprehend" border crossers, and that "now, federal troops participating in JTF-SB, and who are operating on the NMNDA, can temporarily detain trespassers until an appropriate law enforcement entity can assume custody", conduct cursory searches and carry out crowd control. It also dates the shift from static detection to patrolling to late March 2025 and records the initial deployments — 1,600 active-duty Marines and soldiers joining 2,500 already-mobilized reservists, then a Stryker brigade combat team and a general support aviation battalion in early March. The Mandate's ask — military personnel used to prevent crossings between ports and to assist in arrests — is in place.

  3. Partially done

    A presidential memorandum to Defense, Interior, Agriculture and DHS assigned the military the mission of "repelling the invasion and sealing the United States southern border", handed DoD jurisdiction over federal border lands (the Roosevelt Reservation) and authorized National Defense Areas, starting with one sector and a 45-day assessment.

  4. Attempted

    Executive Order 14167 directed the Secretary of Defense to revise the Unified Command Plan within 10 days to assign USNORTHCOM the mission of sealing the borders and repelling unlawful mass migration; EO 14165 §4 directed DoD and DHS to deploy sufficient personnel along the southern border. Directives only, on day one.

Research log

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

Research notes

  • None of those pages refused us, and this done no longer rests on news reporting (re-read 2026-09-06). war.gov article 4166835 and the two 2026 articles now cited as Evidence were fetched and read in full; the search snippets we first had to work from — troops who “can temporarily detain trespassers until an appropriate law enforcement entity can assume custody”, and “more than 20,000 service members” across five NDAs covering 656 miles — are the Department’s own sentences, and they are now quoted from the documents rather than from snippets. The NPR citation was dropped: a news source is cited only for a fact the government’s own record does not carry, and the Department’s account covers this one.
  • How the war.gov releases were listed, since the spotlight page itself cannot be read: the Support to the Southern Border spotlight (war.gov/Spotlights/Support-to-the-Southern-Border) opens but draws its index in the browser, with no article text in it — a page that opens but hides its content, not one that refused us. What works is the site’s own news feeds for News Stories, Releases and Press Products; each returns 500 items, which for News Stories reaches back to 2026-01-08 and for Releases to 2025-01-02. Articles older than the News Stories cap are still reachable by their numeric id, which redirects to the full article address — which is how the April 2025 article was recovered.
  • Still not read: army.mil article 285055 and northcom.mil release 4120682, both of which refused to open for us when we first tried them and neither needed once the Department’s own accounts opened.
  • The Hill, “US troops begin detaining migrants on border defense zone” (thehill.com/policy/defense/5347580-…) would date the first detentions but refused to open for us; Washington Post coverage of the first trespass charges (2025-04-29) and their dismissal by a magistrate (2025-05-15) was seen only as search results. Leads.
  • The Mandate’s Chapter 17 sentence names National Guardsmen as well as active-duty troops. Federalized Guard deployments we found (Newsom v. Trump, N.D. Cal. 3:25-cv-04870, Los Angeles, June 2025; Ninth Circuit 25-3727, 25-5553, 25-7781) concern cities, not the border, and are not tracked here. Texas’s Operation Lone Star Guard remains under state orders.
  • No court order stops the border deployment itself. The trespass prosecutions in the NDAs were partly dismissed in D.N.M. in May 2025 (secondary, not loaded); the deployment and detention authority continued.
Action
expand
Object
military role in defending the borders
ID
452