One year ago the Trump administration turned 180 miles of New Mexico's border with Mexico into an extended military base. The stated goal was to deter illegal border crossings. What it has actually created is a legal crisis that is overwhelming federal courts and wasting millions of dollars on cases the government knows it cannot win.

In the past year federal prosecutors have filed misdemeanor charges more than 2,000 times against people caught in the new National Defense Area. Judges keep throwing the cases out. The government cannot prove that those charged even knew they were entering a military zone. Federal judges have repeatedly criticized prosecutors for continuing to bring charges that do not hold up in court.

So prosecutors found a workaround. Instead of presenting cases to judges for review they began filing criminal charges through a process that bypasses judicial oversight entirely. A process the ACLU says is typically reserved for minor violations and was never intended for this purpose.

"The audacity that the government has shown in circumventing the court's process has been really egregious," said Becca Sheff, staff attorney for the ACLU of New Mexico.

This is not border security. It is legal theater that is clogging courts, overwhelming public defenders and burning through taxpayer money on prosecutions with a failure rate of 60% or higher.

Congress must investigate this program immediately. The militarized border zone in New Mexico has produced thousands of failed prosecutions and zero meaningful results. It is time to end the overreach.

Sign this petition and tell Congress: investigate the New Mexico militarized border zone and stop the prosecutorial overreach now.