NOGALES, Ariz. (AP) \u2014 Inside an armored vehicle, an Army scout uses a joystick to direct a long-range optical scope toward a man perched atop the U.S.-Mexico border wall cutting across the hills of this Arizona frontier community.<\/p>\n
The man lowers himself toward U.S. soil between coils of concertina wire. Shouts ring out, an alert is sounded and a U.S. Border Patrol SUV races toward the wall \u2014 warning enough to send the man scrambling back over it, disappearing into Mexico.<\/p>\n
The sighting Tuesday was one of only two for the Army infantry unit patrolling this sector of the southern border, where an emergency declaration by President Donald Trump has thrust the military into a central role<\/a> in deterring migrant crossings between U.S. ports of entry.<\/p>\n \u201cDeterrence is actually boring,\u201d said 24-year-old Army Sgt. Ana Harker-Molina, voicing the tedium felt by some fellow soldiers over the sporadic sightings. <\/p>\n Still, she said she takes pride in the work, knowing that troops discourage crossings by their mere presence. <\/p>\n \u201cJust if we\u2019re sitting here watching the border, it\u2019s helping our country,\u201d said Harker-Molina, an immigrant herself who came from Panama at age 12 and became a U.S. citizen two years ago while serving in the Army.<\/p>\n U.S. troop deployments at the border have tripled to 7,600 and include every branch of the military \u2014 even as the number of attempted illegal crossings plummet and Trump has authorized funding for an additional 3,000 Border Patrol agents<\/a>, offering $10,000 signing and retention bonuses.<\/p>\n The military mission is guided from a new command center at a remote Army intelligence training base alongside southern Arizona\u2019s Huachuca Mountains. There, a community hall has been transformed into a bustling war room of battalion commanders and staff with digital maps pinpointing military camps and movements along the nearly 2,000-mile border. <\/p>\n Until now border enforcement had been the domain of civilian law enforcement, with the military only intermittently stepping in. But in April, large swaths of border were designated militarized zones, empowering U.S. troops to apprehend immigrants and others accused of trespassing on Army, Air Force or Navy bases, and authorizing additional criminal charges that can mean prison time.<\/p>\n The two-star general leading the mission says troops are being untethered from maintenance and warehouse tasks to work closely with U.S. Border Patrol agents in high-traffic areas for illegal crossings \u2014 and to deploy rapidly to remote, unguarded terrain.<\/p>\n \u201cWe don\u2019t have a (labor) union, there\u2019s no limit on how many hours we can work in a day, how many shifts we can man,\u201d said Army Maj. Gen. Scott Naumann. <\/p>\n \u201cI can put soldiers out whenever we need to in order to get after the problem and we can put them out for days at a time, we can fly people into incredibly remote areas now that we see the cartels shifting\u201d course. <\/p>\n Patrols aimed at stopping \u2018got-aways\u2019<\/p>\n At Nogales, Army scouts patrolled the border in full battle gear \u2014 helmet, M5 service rifle, bullet-resistant vest \u2014 with the right to use deadly force if attacked under standing military rules integrated into the border mission. Underfoot, smugglers for decades routinely attempted to tunnel into stormwater drains to ferry contraband into the U.S. <\/p>\n Naumann\u2019s command post oversees an armada of 117 armored Stryker vehicles, more than 35 helicopters and a half-dozen long-distance drones that can survey the border day and night with sensors to pinpoint people wandering the desert. Marine Corps engineers are adding concertina wire to slow crossings, as the Trump administration reboots border wall construction.<\/p>\n Naumann said the focus is on stopping \u201cgot-aways\u201d who evade authorities to disappear into the U.S. in a race against the clock that can last seconds in urban areas as people vanish into smuggling vehicles, or several days in the dense wetland thickets of the Rio Grande or the vast desert and mountainous wilderness of Arizona.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, the rate of apprehensions at the border has fallen to a 60-year low. <\/p>\n Naumann says the fall-off in illegal entries is the \u201celephant in the room\u201d as the military increases pressure and resources aimed at starving smuggling cartels \u2014 including Latin American gangs recently designated as foreign terrorist organizations. <\/p>\n He says it would be wrong to let up, though, and that crossings may rebound with the end of scorching summer weather.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019ve got to keep going after it, we\u2019re having some successes, we are trending positively,\u201d he said of the mission with no fixed end-date.<\/p>\n Militarized zones are \u2018a gray area\u2019<\/p>\n The Trump administration is using the military broadly to boost its immigration operations, from guarding federal buildings in Los Angeles against protests over ICE detentions, to assisting Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Florida to plans to hold detained immigrants on military bases in New Jersey, Indiana and Texas.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s all part of the same strategy that is a very muscular, robust, intimidating, aggressive response to this \u2014 to show his base that he was serious about a campaign promise to fix immigration,\u201d said Dan Maurer, a law professor at Ohio Northern University and a retired U.S. Army judge advocate officer. <\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s both norm-breaking and unusual. It puts the military in a very awkward position.\u201d<\/p>\n