LAREDO, Texas — The Trump administration has deployed military Strykers to the southwest border, ramping up immigration enforcement in ways unseen during the Biden administration and more visible to local communities.
In Laredo, Texas, one Army Stryker – an eight-wheeled armored vehicle used in military operations – is stationed in front of the Rio Grande River, a stone’s throw from Mexico and steps from a city park. It’s parked underneath the pedestrian bridge that connects Laredo to its sister city, Nuevo Laredo, Mexico.
President Donald Trump has increased military presence in non-border cities as well, deploying the National Guard to Los Angeles in response to anti-ICE protests and to Washington, D.C., to combat crime.
Trump has argued that tackling illegal immigration will also reduce crime committed by undocumented immigrants.
Changes at the border
Border enforcement in the Laredo sector looks different today than it did just a few years ago, according to Border Patrol Chief of the Laredo Sector Jesse Muñoz, who says stricter enforcement policies and advanced technology have reshaped operations.
Apprehension numbers are historically low, averaging just 20–25 per day, compared to thousands in past years.
Muñoz, who began his career as a Border Patrol agent in Laredo in 2006, described the changes as transformative. “It’s really kind of changed border enforcement, how we operate,” he said.
At any given moment, Border Patrol cars patrol city roads and station themselves along the river, where city parks are also located. Although Laredo residents are all too familiar with seeing Border Patrol vehicles, some say they’ve noticed an increased presence.
“You notice that there's a lot more Border Patrol in town,” said business owner Janet Zapata.
Border Patrol falls under the Department of Homeland Security, a federal agency, and is not a military branch. However, the all-hands-on-deck approach, coordinated among Border Patrol, the Laredo Police Department, the Webb County Sheriff’s Department, the military, and other local law enforcement agencies, has positioned the city to become one of the safest in the U.S.
“Their presence here is obvious, given an enforcement aspect that we've really haven't seen,” said Public Information Officer Joe Baeza with the Laredo Police Department.
The location of the military vehicle is steps from the Tres Laredos city park and near an outlet mall, uniquely reflecting a dichotomy between two worlds – residents living their daily lives as immigration agents circle around.
"It's normal to see Border Patrol to me. My mom lives about a block away from the river, by Laredo South, and we hear Border Patrol all the time, and it's just part of life," said local journalist Alex Cano. "That's what you see. You see a possible chase. You just make sure you move to the side. But you know that it has nothing to do with you."
LPD does not directly handle immigration enforcement, but officers may encounter a situation that requires collaboration with Border Patrol, like a traffic stop involving an undocumented immigrant ending in a high-speed chase or busting a stash house.
Stash houses are where human smugglers hold migrants, often in overcrowded and unsanitary conditions for days or weeks. LPD has received fewer reports of stash houses.
“It’s probably because of the substantial drop in the number of people coming here,” Baeza said.
Things have looked different at the border, but “safe” is how locals characterized Laredo; the city’s annual homicide rates often don’t surpass double digits. Overall, life in Laredo, as residents described, is community- and family-oriented, frequently misjudged by outsiders looking in.
“Every city does have danger, but just because we're living on the border doesn’t mean it’s actually dangerous,” Zapata said.
Immigration can be portrayed as a crisis and chaos, but Laredoans say life is more about community than conflict.
But does militarization improve public safety?
The arrival of military surveillance vehicles at the river raised concerns among some residents. Muñoz dismissed the idea of militarization, insisting the assets are strictly supportive.
“There is no militarization at the border. They’re here to help with border security,” he told The Fulcrum. “They don’t do any military operations. They’re 100% in a support role.”
The Center for Civilians in Conflict, an organization that advocates against governmental policies that it deems harmful to civilians, defines militarization as the influence of equipment, tactics, and mindset on domestic law enforcement. This includes the transfer of military equipment and the regular flow of personnel to local law enforcement agencies.
Police militarization “is where the police and military intersect in weaponry, funding, and tactics, according to another organization, War Resisters League.
The Laredo Police Department said it does not work directly with either the military or Border Patrol.
However, public interest and debate over what’s visible spark the question of whether the Trump administration’s policies and actions are effective for public safety.
The military has traditionally been called upon to respond to civil disorder, not crime, according to Ronald Spector, a George Washington University professor emeritus of history and international relations and a Marine veteran.
“I don’t think there are many instances where in the past where the National Guard was called up specifically to reduce crime,” Spector told The Fulcrum. “The National Guard and the militia before that were conceived as forces that would be called up in case of civil disorders, such as strikes or riots.”
On the border, one of the largest interventions occurred in 1916, when President Woodrow Wilson sent the U.S. Army into Mexico after Pancho Villa raided Columbus, New Mexico.
“It was a complete failure… they never captured Pancho,“ Spector said. “Very shortly after the Marines arrived [in Latin America], they realized that they needed police. They weren’t optimum for preventing crime and chasing bandits.”
Ashley N. Soriano is a graduate student at Northwestern University Medill School of Journalism in the Politics, Policy, and Foreign Affairs specialization.
The Fulcrum is committed to nurturing the next generation of journalists. To learn about the many NextGen initiatives we are leading, click HERE.
Children watch a July Fourth Parade along the Walkway of Heroes and Independence Avenue on July 04, 2026 in Tappan, New York.
The Great American Grumpfest
Our nation’s 250th birthday party didn’t feel especially patriotic and wasn’t as much fun as the 200th anniversary was.
President Trump, who did his best to co-opt our holiday for his personal aggrandizement, was a major reason. The party he threw in Washington, D.C., was crankier than uplifting, and less about celebrating our shared past and a promising future than about reminding us how far we have strayed from our founders’ plan to create a republic that future Americans would keep in good working order.
Credit Trump this much. He has a singular gift for picking at scabs that other politicians would rather ignore and pushing us into reckonings we don’t need.
The thing is, Americans have seen all this before. Sometimes the makeover we were encouraged to undertake was more conservative, sometimes more liberal. Whatever direction we were pushing, however, the reckoning we had in mind this time had to be more forthright and the conclusion more definitive than it was the last time.
Our current discontents, the ones behind the reckoning President Trump has been trying to inspire, are not trivial. Included among them are immigration, birthright citizenship, exploding healthcare costs, election rigging, a gag-inducing national debt, how we educate our children, too many genders, racial differences we can’t move past, a lopsided economy that favors more well-off Americans, and historic levels of political corruption and graft. Add to these the several foreign adventures he has pushed us into or is anxious to undertake, and you have the makings of a national headache the likes of which we haven’t had in half a century.
All the elbow-throwing and overheated rhetoric we’re using today have begun to look almost normal in all the ways that bickering neighbors and feuding family members appear normal. But they have also made us look mean-spirited and have portrayed our differences as irreconcilable. To ourselves, of course, but also to many people outside the United States who might be forgiven for turning their heads and not looking at the national car wreck we Americans show no interest in avoiding.
The good news, as I suggested above, is that Americans have had a great deal of practice dealing with challenges and national car wrecks like these.
This essay begins to lay out the reasons why.
By way of illustration, we have our seemingly insatiable demand for more bad news about race in America.
Sixty years after being released from the legal constrictions that bedeviled both white and black Americans, many white people have come to believe the color that used to make them unassailable is now a sign of a moral inferiority born of a racial animus they can never wash off. Many black people, on the other hand, are insisting that America is as hopelessly stacked against them as the formerly unassailable white people’s ancestors used to tell their black ones.
The result is that many people today are buying into racist nightmares and mumbo jumbo that their black and white ancestors worked hard and effectively to put in each other’s heads.
This might be dismissed as crazy behavior if it weren’t so important to rituals Americans have long used to express their deepest fears about each other while figuring out what move they can make that won’t end with their world crashing down on everybody’s head.
Unfortunately, the kind of cultural sleight of hand we have used to ramp up our racial differences has been appropriated by people who have many other cultural fears and unresolved differences with each other. Their clumsy but culturally prescribed missteps are making all these other issues look as irremediable as our racial problems.
A good place to start an answer to how we back away from ledges is Alexis de Tocqueville’s writing on early-19th-century American democracy. He had an optimistic take on Americans’ unscripted displays of public bravado, recrimination, and payback.
For him, these were occasions when people tried to mitigate the effects of the unfair hand they were dealing someone else or had themselves been dealt by behaving in ways quite at odds with how they would otherwise be expected to act. These inversions of what Tocqueville called “the natural order of conscience” presented themselves as a loud but culturally muted challenge to the hypocrisies that people had built into the world they’d made together.
One of his favorite illustrations of early-American hypocrisy involved slave masters sleeping with their less-than-worthy slaves. To the best of my knowledge, he didn’t pick up on all the ways that slaves messed with their owners. Their well-chronicled and quiet resistance showed that even severely ill-treated people can exercise more control over their lives than outsiders appreciate.
Be that as it may, such inversions of a people’s “natural order of conscience” make a good public show of them wrestling with demons they can’t or may not want to shake off, but in any case, are nowhere close to figuring out how to cast out.
Implicit in these disruptions was the discomforting idea that people might flip the entire script and turn the world on its head in more permanent ways. That kind of flipping worked out better for us in our revolution against England than in our Civil War. These events taught us the value of stepping back from historically unprecedented ledges.
Americans of late have been giving loud expression to a long list of things they don’t like about each other and the last makeover they started but didn’t finish a half-century ago. The outcome of our fights today will be as revealing as they are embarrassing to everyone who imagined they could recast our country in a way that privileged their favorite kind of Americans.
Their disappointment with the accommodations they strike will be palpable, but the middling results they achieve with all their pushing and shoving won’t be anything they can’t live with.
Anthropologists who have written about such moments in other cultures less “advanced” than our own show that people find ways to work around their seemingly irreconcilable differences without ever fully resolving them. Indeed, the patches and repairs people make have the unheralded effect of reinforcing rather than undermining the legitimacy of the practices and values they thought were fundamentally flawed.
For example…
White guilt and black pessimism do more good than putting cash into the pockets of professional shamers and handwringers. They give the rest of us who don’t feel guilty or powerless more time to make the world less racially unequal. Good news.
Regarding illegal immigration, the entrance requirements for future immigrants will remain stringent. Americans will applaud the continued detention and deportation of the few illegal immigrants who commit serious crimes. Good news.
All the people who came to the United States without being legally vetted and were locked up for a time will be released in numbers small enough to avoid serious media attention. Along with the several million other good people who snuck in but avoided capture, the former detainees will go to school, find gainful employment, pay their taxes, and stay out of trouble. Many will eventually become citizens. Good news.
Investigations into election tampering and Donald Trump’s 2020 presidential loss will come to an unceremonious conclusion the day after his second term ends. Many Americans will grumble about this, but there will also be some quiet partying, too. Good and bad news.
Congressional hearings into all the grifting accomplished by people tied to the Trump administration will end without anyone having to pay a dime back to the American taxpayers. Bad news, we’ll learn to live with.
New laws and regulations will be created in the hope that the kind of corruption practiced by President Trump will not be repeated for another 250 years. Good news, I hope we’ll live long enough to enjoy.
Show trials for people who allegedly vandalized the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, if they happen, will get big television viewer ratings. Good news.
Trials for pardoned Capitol insurrectionists who committed serious crimes after their release should get more attention, but won’t. Bad news.
We will continue to hear nothing from most of the people who were pardoned for crimes they committed in the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. They will keep their mouths shut and their heads down for the rest of their life. Good news.
The gold-gilded ornaments that Donald Trump had plastered all over the White House will be shipped to Mar-a-Lago, where the former president will sell them on eBay. Fun news.
American taxpayers end up paying for most of the new East Wing, the removal of the miniature gladiatorial arena that was built behind the White House, and the restoration of the White House rose garden. Bad news.
The Triumphal Arch was never built. Good news.
Trad wives and gay couples raise perfectly lovely children. Good but unsurprising news.
Trans men and women learn that most Americans can’t figure out who they used to be. No one gives a second thought to their use of “family bathrooms” or “unisex bathrooms” in public settings, businesses, and schools. Communities will sponsor athletic teams that have trans boys and girls just to show they can. Good news.
Budget deficits will be kicked down the road for someone else’s children to pay down. Bad news.
Federal agencies that had their budgets and employee ranks slashed during President Trump’s second term are getting some of the money and lost positions back. Good news.
Elite universities will buy their way out of DEI purgatory by competing for conservative scholars whose inflated salaries dwarf those of their liberal colleagues, who will think about suing their institutions for reverse discrimination but won’t be able to figure out who would pay for it or care. More fun news.
Okay. I’ve probably missed some ways that Americans will step back from the ledges they have been making noises about leaping off. But to the extent that my predictions pan out, the best and most important moral of the stories about us stepping away is this: everything we lost and took back, or had returned to us, will have happened without our government collapsing, civic traditions crumbling, or our people beating each other up.
The reason why is that the differences Americans have with each other really weren’t as irreconcilable as we made them out to be. The empty-sounding bromide that Americans have more that unites us than divides us turns out to be true, not just metaphorically but in fact.
Now that is really something to celebrate.
Daniel J. Monti (danieljmonti.com) is Professor of Sociology at Saint Louis University and the author of American Democracy and Disconsent: Liberalism and Illiberalism in Ferguson, Charlottesville, Black Lives Matter, and the Capitol Insurrection.