WASHINGTON D.C. (KEYT) – California's Senate delegation singed onto a letter demanding more information after a Senate report found that more than $2 billion dollars from the defense budget has been diverted to conduct immigration enforcement this year.
Thursday's report detailed that at least $1 billion in defense appropriated funds have already been diverted and that the Department of Defense (DoD) has requested an additional $5 billion in its Fiscal Year 2026 budget for domestic law enforcement efforts along the national border.
"When the military is tasked with immigration enforcement — a role that is not consistent with DoD’s
mission, and that servicemembers have neither signed up nor been trained for — those operations
often cost several times more than when the same function is performed by civilian authorities," noted the Senate report. "Diverting military resources to immigration enforcement not only imposes a financial strain on the military but also carries significant intangible costs. Such diversions have been found to undermine the military’s readiness to respond to emergencies. For example, leading into peak fire season, the California National Guard firefighting unit was 'understaffed because roughly half its members [were] deployed to Los Angeles.'"
Despite the notable increase of $170 billion to the Department of Homeland Security through the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill into law, the Senate report noted that, "the vast majority" of Department of Defense funds spent on domestic immigration enforcement have not been reimbursed.
The Senate report stated that over the course of this year, the Department of Defense has tied itself to domestic immigration enforcement in the following ways:
- Deploying National Guard members and active duty personnel to the southern border, ICE-operated facilities, and to cities across the nation
- Transferred hundreds of miles of federal land at the nation's southern border to direct military control and designating the transferred federal property as "military installations"
- Permitting the detention of non-citizens on military installations within the United States and oversees
- Conducting deportation flights and detainee transfers on military aircraft
- Authorizing the reassignment of attorneys from the Judge Advocate General's Corps (JAG) to serve as immigration judges
Thursday's report admitted that military resources have been used to support border security in the past, but the exact size of the deployments -something the report also noted remains unconfirmed- already dwarfs prior deployments for law enforcement purposes.
As of July of this year, there were roughly 8,500 soldiers deployed to the southern border with an estimated cost of $5.3 million per day shared the report.
According to the report, during fiscal year 2025, the Department of Defense has diverted nearly $900 million and obligated over $1 billion to immigration enforcement along the southern border from other budgeted priorities including maintenance hangers for equipment, barracks improvements, and military construction projects in the Pacific.
The decision to designate hundreds of miles of land along the southern border as "National Defense Areas" allows members of the military to detain people entering the areas as trespassers, subject to up to 12 months in jail with an estimated c