WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump’s use of thousands of U.S. troops to aid in immigration enforcement is set to cost the Defense Department from $1 billion to $2 billion this year, Pentagon officials recently told lawmakers.

The money will support a bolstered U.S. military force along the U.S.-Mexico border and the transport of immigrants to the U.S. military’s prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, said Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., in little-noticed remarks at a Tuesday hearing of the Armed Services Committee.

Reed, the committee’s top Democrat, said the immigration tasks are mostly best left to the Department of Homeland Security. They are expensive, he said, and are hurting U.S. military readiness.

“At best, the (Defense) Department estimates that it will spend $1 billion to $2 billion for unplanned border missions this year, even as illegal migrant encounters are at the lowest level since August of 2020,” Reed said at Tuesday’s hearing. “The Government Accountability Office has assessed these missions in recent years and found: ‘Separating units in order to assign a portion of them to the southwest border mission was a consistent trend in degrading readiness ratings.’”

Military flights suspended

At issue is the deployment of more than 12,000 troops to the southwest border and the costly transportation of deported immigrants on military aircraft to Guantánamo Bay, where another roughly 1,000 troops are working to hastily prepare a camp there for the possible arrival of up to 30,000 immigrants on Trump’s orders.

Concerns about the costs have grown inside the administration. The Pentagon said Wednesday it was suspending the use of military aircraft to deport immigrants amid the fiscal concerns, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal.

The Defense Department immigration activities come as the Trump administration has made cost-cutting at the Pentagon and elsewhere a flagship initiative.

The U.S. military’s beefed-up role in border security also comes as officials seek to focus the Defense Department on preparing for a possible war with China, a pivot that some officials have suggested could lead to a scaling back of U.S. troop presence in other areas, including Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

Some Democrats, including Reed, have said the immigration deployments are at odds with both the fiscal discipline and the need to devote people and money to the primary threats.

‘Domestic political theater’

Tuesday’s hearing was convened to consider the nomination of Elbridge Colby to be the Pentagon’s undersecretary for policy. Colby and some of the deputy assistant secretaries serving in the department’s policy office have said America’s global military posture should be rebalanced to focus more on Asia and less on other regions.

At the hearing, Sen. Tammy Duckworth, D-Ill., asked Colby about the surge of thousands of active-duty U.S. military personnel to perform immigration duties, which she said are occurring “not to counter an active military threat, but instead to perform law enforcement and accomplish logistical tasks that are typically handled by civilian agencies.”

Duckworth asked Colby: “Given your stated concerns about the need to strengthen deterrence against the communist republic of China, do you believe diverting military assets to perform domestic political theater at the border is an effective use of our limited defense resources, or is it a distraction from the real threats that we face?”

To that question, Colby replied: “Well, senator, I wouldn’t regard it as domestic political theater to secure our border and to make sure that we have territorial integrity. But, if confirmed, I would certainly make it a real priority to make sure that those rightful efforts to ensure our territorial integrity and secure our border don’t detract from our prioritizing the China threat, which is the biggest kind of external state threat that we face as a country.”

Costly cargo planes

Meanwhile, NBC News reported Wednesday that the Trump administration may rein in plans to use the Guantánamo Bay facility as a massive immigration detention center, as officials come to terms with the rising costs and the legal and logistical challenges associated with the plan.

Apart from the cost of building accommodations for thousands of detainees at Guantánamo Bay, flying immigrants there on military cargo planes at thousands of dollars per detainee per flight is more expensive than using commercial aircraft, the report said — and both types of flights are more expensive than detaining immigrants at stateside facilities such as Fort Bliss in Texas.

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