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Posted on 08/29/2026 3:05:23 PM PDT by TheDon
The Department of Homeland Security devised an unusual legal tool last year that made it possible for National Guard members to participate in immigration enforcement operations, according to an internal memo obtained by POLITICO.
Officials issued the confidential memo to state attorneys general in April 2025 authorizing Guard troops to “perform immigration functions” outside of their home state, including arresting unauthorized immigrants, although it is not clear whether troops did so.
The document offered a way for officials to circumvent a law that prevents the military from performing law enforcement duties, known as the Posse Comitatus Act. National Guard troops are part of the military. The memo justifies the shifted rule by saying the Homeland Security secretary can designate any federal employee — which Guard troops become when they are ordered to another state — as an immigration officer.
The agency has yet to use the argument in court, but the unprecedented legal theory underpinning the document underscores the creative lengths the administration has gone to buttress its immigration crackdown.
And it has also worried legal scholars, who viewed the memo and said the administration was flouting the law.
“DHS is trying to pull a fast one,” said Joseph Nunn, who specializes in domestic uses of the military at the Brennan Center for Justice, which has been critical of the Trump administration’s immigration actions.
The government by law can only use the military for “exact, unmistakable terms,” Nunn said, not with broad discretion.
The existence of the memo was long suspected in legal circles, especially since Guard units from Texas, Tennessee and other states have helped the agency carry out many of the clerical and logistical tasks needed to arrest, process and deport unauthorized immigrants. The Trump administration has used National Guard units, mostly from Republican-led states, for a litany of security missions, among them border enforcement.
Some units have also protected Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents as they’ve carried out arrests, although the administration has yet to use Guard members to apprehend and detain targets.
American Oversight, a liberal-leaning watchdog group, obtained the document through a Freedom of Information Act request.
Chioma Chukwu, executive director of American Oversight, said the “memo should alarm every American” ahead of the midterms.
DHS, in a statement, said it will “let the letter speak for itself.”
The author of the April 17, 2025 memo is redacted, but the memo was sent from the department’s acting general counsel at the time, Joseph Mazzara. He went on to serve at Customs and Border Protection before leaving the department.
DHS “is pushing the envelope in every possible way they can,” said Doris Meissner, a former director of Immigration and Naturalization Services, now at the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute think tank in Washington.
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Looks like Doris thinks it's all legal.
The problem is labor. The guard is a source of trained people who can do a variety of tasks. The government could create a mechanism to use the guard during their callup period but in civilian clothes as temporary employees.
Is a soldier still a soldier when he’s not soldiering?
National Guardsmen typically have civilian jobs and Guard activity is usually just a few weeks a year, yes?
So, instead of having a day job as, let’s say, a cabaret dancer, why can’t that day job be “ICE agent”?
As long as they’re not showing up w/tanks and artillery, seems cool to me.
It is called Title 32. Yes it can be done very easy if soldiers remain CONUS. Did it all the time. Keeps soldiers off the Title 10 gig yet it gives them a retirement point a day without all the Title 10 restrictions.
There are many who are referred to as Guard Bums. Have done it myself when in-between civilian employment gigs. It pays the bills and bolsters the retirement in the end. So many ways to grab additional man days that it boggles the minds of civilians but makes the Guard Bum happy.
Trump should establish the “Border Guard” as a new branch of service in the mold of the Coast Guard. Department of Homeland Security during peacetime, but can be shifted to the US Army when needed (just as when the USCG is shifted to the USN). Like his establishment of the Space Force, units would be transferred from existing command structure. Reassign units from ICE, US Customs and Border Protection, and the US Army.
If they really wanted to speed up the process, put out rewards through entities such as Crimestoppers.
Give the bounty hunters a percentage of fines, assets seized, and of taxpayer funds no longer distributed to the illegal aliens.
None of these pro illegal scum seemed to have a problem when the Guard, under biden, was opening the border fence so the illegals could get on buses and be dispersed in the country.
nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute think tank in Washington
LMAO...”nonpartisan”.
"Yeah, but I'm not going to be your policeman. There's a reason why you separate military and the police. One fights the enemy of the state. The other serves and protects the people. When the military becomes both, then the enemies of the state tend to become the people."
Immigration privateering. Or Immigration bounty hunting.
CC
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