Retired Army Special Forces officer Mike Nelson criticized Hegseth's rhetoric, stating, 'That's a necessary end to achieve goals through military force - you have to kill people to achieve them. That's not the end. It's a weird obsession with death for the sake of it.'
The U.S. crackdown on migration from Mexico has destroyed a sacred site shared by both countries. Explosions were heard last weekend on Cuchuma Hill as part of construction work on the border wall.
The Donald Trump administration has insisted their actions are lawful and in compliance with the Law of Armed Conflict, with justification centred around "the United States' inherent right of self-defence as a matter of international law." The occupants targeted in the operation have been designated as "narco-terrorists" or members of "designated terrorist organizations," as a justification for blowing them out of the water-except, to date, no evidence or intelligence to back up those claims has been presented by the US to the public.
Of the 15 officers who died in the line of duty while working for Enforcement and Removal Operations, the ICE branch charged with detaining unauthorized migrants within the interior of the US, all but two died of Covid. One deportation officer, Brian Beliso, died of a heart attack in 2020 during a foot chase. The other deportation officer to die of something other than Covid, Lorenzo Roberto Gomez, experienced heat stress during a training exercise in El Paso, Texas, leading to hospitalization.
The government's ability to deal with drones that pose a threat on American soil has been questioned this week after the use of a laser designed to shoot down drones near the border in Texas led to the abrupt closure of the airspace over El Paso, sources familiar with the situation told The Associated Press. The details of exactly what happened before the Federal Aviation Administration shut down the busy airport in the Mexican border city on Wednesday aren't entirely clear,