Hamza Adam 
President Donald Trump appears to be employing a radical new strategy to get around federal law that prohibits the use of the military to enforce immigration law, said a prominent immigration rights attorney on Friday.
The 1878 Posse Comitatus Act prohibits the use of the military for civilian law enforcement except in very narrow circumstances, which do not apply to Trump’s efforts to ramp up expulsion of immigrants from the country. But Trump’s apparent end-run around became clear on Friday evening when he dropped a new presidential memorandum directed at the Secretaries of Defense, Interior, Agriculture, and Homeland Security.
“President Trump is authorizing the military to occupy and take jurisdiction over public land along the southern border,” reported Politico’s Kyle Cheney in response to the order.
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Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow with the American Immigration Counsel, had a dark view of the purpose of this directive.
“Welp they’re doing the Roosevelt Reservation crazy strategy, giving the military ‘jurisdiction’ over a 60-foot-wide stretch of land from CA to AZ and then claim that migrants are being arrested for ‘trespassing on military property’ thus trying to bypass the Posse Commitatus Act,” he wrote on X.
This comes at a time when Trump is attempting to boost mass deportation efforts, with a number of high-profile court battles duking it out over the precise extent of his powers.