ACLU of New Mexico Publishes 'The Invisible Military Bases at the Border' Report Documenting 4,600+ Federal Trespass Cases and 109,651 Acres of National Defense Areas in NM Alone

On April 21, 2026, the American Civil Liberties Union of New Mexico published “The ‘Invisible’ Military Bases at the Border,” a report documenting the operational consequences of the year-old National Defense Area (NDA) architecture established by NSPM-4 (see 2025-04-11–nspm-4-national-defense-area-roosevelt-reservation-first-designation). The report constitutes the load-bearing documentary anchor for the year-one assessment of the NDA federal architecture.

Key findings:

• 109,651 acres in New Mexico alone have been designated as National Defense Areas — DoD-jurisdiction federal land where unlawful entry is prosecutable under 18 U.S.C. § 1382 with a six-month penalty stacking on top of the standard 8 U.S.C. § 1325 unlawful-entry charge. The total acreage is orders of magnitude beyond the originally-disclosed 170-square-mile (~108,800-acre) initial designation, indicating expansion within New Mexico beyond the originally-disclosed Roosevelt Reservation strip.
• 4,600+ federal cases alleging military-trespass violations have been filed since April 2025, with one federal magistrate in Las Cruces assigned 400+ cases in less than a month.
• The zones are “not fenced-in or well-marked by signage, and the government has not provided the public with accurate maps of the zones.” Federal judges including Chief Magistrate Judge Gregory Wormuth have dismissed dozens of cases at the probable-cause stage on the ground that the prosecution cannot prove the defendant knew they were in a military zone.
• Federal prosecutors have responded by shifting to charging via criminal information — a charging mechanism that bypasses the initial probable-cause requirement — and by increasing prosecutorial staffing in southern New Mexico. The ACLU characterizes this as the federal judiciary being “in an uneasy standoff” with federal prosecutors over the military trespass charges.
• ACLU-NM calls for congressional oversight, characterizing the NDA architecture as “a deeply alarming expansion of executive power” and as providing federal prosecutors with “a dangerously overbroad tool for filing charges.”

Direct quote (ACLU-NM report): “The judges continue to expend valuable time and resources on the military trespass charges, as does the Federal Public Defender’s office. The migrants caught up in this charade continue to be dragged into court and charged with crimes that the government knows it cannot prove.”

The report is the substrate document for any subsequent coverage of the NDA architecture; it consolidates the case-count data, the prosecutorial-workaround pattern, the acreage figures, and the call for congressional oversight in one citable artifact. Local court reporting (Phaedra Haywood / Santa Fe New Mexican, May 16, 2026) draws extensively from this report — see 2026-05-16–haywood-santa-fe-aclu-invisible-military-bases-coverage.