From neighborhood parks to remote wildernesses, the MAGA regime is weaponizing public places for refuge and recreation so they can abduct our neighbors from their communities and families. Now we face an urgent need to defend our core freedoms to move safely, breathe clean air, protect healthy water, and provide a better life for our children and future generations.
This is a brief on proposed legislation and executive policies by MAGA republicans related to mass surveillance on public land, public land militarization, and the abduction of our community members based on what we look like, where we come from, and how we express our beliefs.
Mass Surveillance
Public lands of all kinds, near and far, are places for solace and meaningful connections with nature and your people. But dangerous policy changes and proposed bills aim to put recreationists under the eye of surveillance technology to bolster ICE and CBP’s ability to target black and brown individuals, people with an accent, and anyone they are with, while enjoying outdoor recreation activities. These active policy changes and proposed bills favor private security and construction firms whose bottom lines rely on mass surveillance at local and national public lands.
Secretarial Order 3442 and the Land and Water Conservation Fund
In September 2025, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum issued Secretarial Order 3442 affecting the Land and Water Conservation Fund (LWCF). It redirects money reserved for parks and outdoor recreation areas nationwide to install guard posts, video surveillance systems, detection devices, and other infrastructure associated with mass surveillance directly within and adjacent to public parks and outdoor recreation areas.
As of the date of this publication, the National Park Service (NPS) has not updated the Land and Water Conservation Fund Stateside Program Manual, which may describe additional details about this alarming policy change. The NPS, a key steward of our public lands, plays a crucial role in shaping the future of our outdoor spaces.
Border Lands Conservation Act and the FLASH Act
These bills would be more accurately called the Mass Surveillance and Demolition on Public Lands Act. The Border Lands Conservation Act (Senator Mike Lee, UT) and FLASH Act (Representative Juan Ciscomani, AZ) are bills introduced in the 119th Congress. They would undermine conservation management in wilderness and public lands across the northern and southern U.S. borders to proliferate mass surveillance and desecrate sacred and cultural areas. These bills would allow “tactical infrastructure” including observation points, remote video surveillance systems, motion sensors, and detection devices in wilderness areas and public lands.
Executive Order 14314 on National Parks
This executive order, issued July 2025, could force the National Park Service and other agencies that steward national park units to ID visitors and record their residential or citizenship status to charge increased entrance fees and reservation fees for “nonresidents”. This is another way for the MAGA regime to record your recreational habits while inflaming anti-immigrant sentiment.
Why Mass Surveillance Is Dangerous
These bills and policies will:
- proliferate polluting generator-powered surveillance systems;
- proliferate remotely operated cameras recording the biometric data and habits of park users and passersby without consent; and
- proliferate the presence of MAGA immigration policy enforcers at public outdoor recreation areas of all kinds.
Already, ICE and CBP have confronted and detained tens of thousands of black and brown community members because of their skin color through the use of surveillance technologies (including those that scrape biometric data) under the shield of the temporary SCOTUS ruling allowing immigration enforcers to racially and ethnically profile community members. This blatant violation of our core values of freedom, equality, and justice for all should stir a sense of injustice in each of us.
We should be asked for our consent before our biometric data is tracked and recorded. The Department of Homeland Security does not have the right to gather your biometric data–that’s why you can opt out of biometric facial screening with CBP and TSA. Consent is nonnegotiable and essential to data privacy. Without consent, the MAGA regime can use our biometric data to more easily harass, disappear, and detain our family members, teachers, neighbors, and colleagues.
Public Land Militarization
Beyond mass surveillance technologies and strategies, the MAGA regime has taken active steps to give the army and private security firms control over public lands and allow them to pollute and destroy nature.
U.S. Army Control of Southern Border Public Lands
National Security Presidential Memorandum 4 authorized the Secretaries of the Interior and Agriculture to militarize public lands on the southern U.S. border. In April, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum transferred jurisdiction over 109,000 acres of public land in New Mexico to the Army.
Interagency cooperation on borderland management has been ongoing for decades. The National Park Service had a pre-existing agreement with Border Patrol to ensure collaboration and minimize harm to wilderness and visitors. Before the MAGA regime undermined these agreements, border land management was usually in compliance with our generations of hard-earned environmental law.
Detention Centers
At the Everglades detention center, coined “Alligator Alcatraz” by President Trump, at least 1,800 migrants are detained. The facility still operates in the heart of Big Cypress National Preserve and Miccosukee Tribe lands, despite a federal court ruling ordering it to cease further construction and detentions in response to Tribal sovereignty and environmental law violations.
Within recent months, the National Park Service website about the detention center location (the former Everglades Jetport) was removed (alongside other history erasures from public lands and in museums). The Miccosukee Tribe intervened in a lawsuit aiming to shutter the facility because it is destroying Tribal members’ freedom to carry out their traditional and ceremonial relationships with the surrounding Tribal and public land. The National Park Service stewards Big Cypress National Preserve. This freshwater swamp is home to tropical birds, the endangered Florida Panther, the endangered Florida Bonneted Bat, black bears, river otters, manatees, mountain lions, Bowfin fish, white-tailed deer, turkey, mangroves, orchids, red-shouldered hawks, and many more species. These species’ habitat is the home and traditional hunting, fishing, and trapping grounds of the Seminole Tribe and the Miccosukee Tribe, including ten Tribal villages within three miles of the detention center.
More than 2,000 people have joined the Florida Interfaith Coalition every Sunday outside of the detention center for prayer vigils and to demand clergy access for the abducted community members.
Border Wall
The construction of the San Rafael Valley border wall–which the FLASH Act would intensify–cuts through the Coronado National Forest, harming conservation lands and community health north and south of the border by cutting off an essential migratory wildlife corridor. The FLASH Act would also expedite border wall construction elsewhere on the southern border and levy increased penalties on migrants, further exacerbating the humanitarian crisis.
We Move Forward
Project 2025 was written to enrich billionaires by privatizing public assets and shuttering essential government services. The MAGA regime is handing over jurisdiction of public lands to the Army to benefit military contractors while allowing public dollars to finance surveillance technology, the border wall, and detention centers. This is a favor to private security firms, AI tech companies, construction firms, manufacturers, and other companies profiting from mass surveillance, bulldozing sacred places, and harassing and disappearing our community members.
Instead of addressing massive economic inequality in our nation and eliminating greenhouse gas emissions so communities everywhere are more safe and stable, the MAGA regime is scapegoating people of all backgrounds who made courageous sacrifices to start new lives in the United States and Puerto Rico. They are getting in the way of people who want to work hard for a dignified life, so billionaires can profit from mass surveillance in outdoor recreation areas and the militarization of our national public lands. These billionaires planned for 2025, but they didn’t plan for us.
The majority of us believe that it is our right to enjoy the outdoors safely. Most of us want this for future generations. We live in a mutually beneficial relationship with our public land and water. When they are healthy, whole, and honest, we are too. That’s why people like us, nationwide, continue to speak up. Together, we successfully took down a proposal in Congress to sell off our public lands. Millions of people, both rural and urban, continue to gather at rallies and protests to oppose the MAGA agenda. Millions commented, shared social media posts, and wrote to the press in defense of roadless forests, conservation and landscape health, as well as our national monuments.
We keep showing up for nature. In doing so, we must support one another. Ahora, seguimos adelante for racial justice, for our democracy, and for policies that allow people to flourish in this country, like an accessible pathway to citizenship and a just and humane immigration system.
