The National Guard is building a “quick reaction force” (QRF) of some 23,500 troops trained in crowd control and civil disturbance that can be ready to deploy to U.S. cities by early next year, according to a leaked memo reported by multiple outlets Wednesday.
The Oct. 8 memo, signed by National Guard Bureau Director of Operations Maj. Gen. Ronald Burkett, orders the Guard from nearly every U.S. state, Puerto Rico and Guam to train 500 service members. States with smaller populations like Delaware will have 250 troops in its force, while Alaska will have 350 and Guam will have 100, Task & Purpose reported.
A previous Pentagon memo issued in September, and revealed by The Guardian, had mandated that the Washington, D.C., National Guard create a “specialized military police battalion” within it “dedicated to ensuring safety and public order in the Nation’s capital as the circumstances may necessitate.”
“You don’t got no ID?” a Border Patrol agent in a baseball cap, sunglasses, and neck gaiter asks a kid on a bike. The officer and three others had just stopped the two young men on their bikes during the day in what a video documenting the incident says is Chicago. One of the boys is filming the encounter on his phone. He says in the video he was born here, meaning he would be an American citizen.
When the boy says he doesn’t have ID on him, the Border Patrol officer has an alternative. He calls over to one of the other officers, “can you do facial?” The second officer then approaches the boy, gets him to turn around to face the sun, and points his own phone camera directly at him, hovering it over the boy’s face for a couple seconds. The officer then looks at his phone’s screen and asks for the boy to verify his name. The video stops.
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Border agents are searching phones at record rates. As reported in Wired, U.S. Customs and Border Protection conducted over 55,000 device searches during fiscal year 2025 — a 17 percent jump from the previous year — and the pace accelerated dramatically in recent months.
The uptick coincides with the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown. What was once a rare airport hassle has become routine checkpoint theater, powered by an expanding arsenal of forensic tools like Cellebrite UFED and GrayKey. These systems can bypass device locks, retrieve deleted files, and rebuild activity timelines in minutes. “What once took weeks of lab work is now a standard procedure.”Earlier this year the CBP put out a request for new tech to help it search for data on people’s phones,” reports Wired. “Even with the current tools, what once took weeks of lab work is now a routine checkpoint procedure.”
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is struggling to quickly hire 10,000 qualified agents for mass deportations, even as it offers signing bonuses of up to a year’s salary.
Why it matters: The agency has received a flood of applications and fast-tracked its training for some recruits. But it’s a huge challenge to add 10,000 agents to a force of 6,000, and White House border czar Tom Homan acknowledges a “high fail rate” on physical standards.