Senate report confirms more than $2 billion in Department of Defense funding diverted to immigration enforcement this year

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 cost of up to $2 billion in military spending by the end of this year explained the report.

Federal law prohibits the use of military personnel or resources to conduct domestic law enforcement and the use of military personnel and facilities in the detention of U.S. Citizen George Retes earlier this year is the subject of unfulfilled Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests filed by Your News Channel.

U.S. Northern Command, which oversees the North American region on behalf of the U.S. Department of Defense, confirmed that records authorizing the use of military personnel and installations during the July raids in Ventura and Santa Barbara counties was not authorized by their office directly, but did note in its response that the Secretary of Defense "can order NORTHCOM [U.S. Northern Command] to provide military facilities to enable their [Department of Homeland Security] operations."

The Department of Defense's Office of the Secretary and Joint Staff and the Department of Defenses Office of Inspector General have not yet responded to Your News Channel's FOIA requests.

Since his arrest in July, Retes has filed a lawsuit about his detention and the Department of Homeland Security claimed he was actually arrested for assault via a social media post on Sep. 17, more than two months after the 25-year-old U.S. Army veteran's detention, but just one day after he penned an op-ed for the San Francisco Chronicle.

Retes denied the assault claims and still has not been charged with any crime in connection with his detention.

"It is mind blowing that they would just..they would try to spin it that way and promote in their own way and try to and just try to use my story as a way to promote ICE [U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement] and what they want to do, I don't know it was just crazy, to say I assaulted officers and just everything, it was insane that they would lie like that," Retes told Your News Channel.

Retes testified in Congress this week alongside multiple other citizens detained by federal immigration enforcement personnel.

"There's no American citizens have been arrested or detained," stated Department of Homeland Security Secretary Noem in October of this year. "We focus on those that are here illegally. And anything that you would hear or report that would be different than that is simply not true and false reporting."

Nonprofit investigative outlet Propublica verified that more than 170 U.S. citizens have been held by the Department of Homeland Security for perceived violations of federal immigration laws this year and according to nonpartisan research group Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), 71.5 percent of all people held in Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody in late September had no criminal convictions.

"The distinction between legal and illegal immigration becomes meaningless when both can destroy a country at its foundation," argued Matthew Tragesser, a spokesperson for the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Office of Public Affairs in a press release last month. "Unchecked mass migration floods the American labor market, depressing wages and taking jobs away from hardworking Americans, while straining healthcare, education, and housing systems."

"In its Fiscal Year 2025 Year End Report to Congress, DoD [Department of Defense] reported that it obligated more than $420 million toward immigration detention operations on military installations in support of DHS," noted Thursday's Senate report. "Historically, the use of military facilities within the United States to house noncitizens has been extremely limited. One of the most infamous exceptions and shameful periods in U.S. history was the Japanese Internment of the 1940s. Since then, military installations within the United States have rarely, if ever, been used to detain noncitizens except as a temporary shelter in emergency situations."

In August of this year, the Trump Administration began to use Fort Bliss in Texas to detain non-citizens and in September, the Department of Defense confirmed it has spent over $363.1 million for "the Fort Bliss Montana Avenue facility in El Paso, Texas" and a Customs and Border Protection processing facility detailed the Senate report.

According to Thursday's Senate report, the unfinished facility started with a 1,000 bed capacity and is expected to expand to 5,000 beds by 2027 at an estimated cost for the Department of Defense of up to $1.2 billion.

The report then detailed the use of U.S. Naval Station Guantanamo Bay to hold non-citizens intercepted at sea by the U.S. Coast Guard.

"DoD [Department of Defense] estimated it spent $40 million detaining noncitizens at Guantánamo in just the first month," explained the report. "By an order of magnitude, detention at Guantánamo is costlier than detention within the United States, given the costs of transporting supplies to Cuba, travel costs and other expenses associated with stationing DoD personnel at Guantánamo, the costs of managing environmental conditions and aging infrastructure, and more. As a point of reference, the cost of detaining individuals accused of terrorism at Guantánamo is $16,540 per day per detainee. Meanwhile, the average daily cost to detain noncitizens in mainland ICE facilities in FY2024 was around $157."

Thursday's report also noted the use of military installations overseas fro immigration enforcement.

"From late May 2025 until early July 2025, the military detained eight men on a U.S. Naval base in Camp Lemonnier, Djibouti in East Africa. The men were bound for South Sudan and were rerouted mid-flight to Djibouti when a judge ordered that the third-country removal to South Sudan violated an existing injunction. DoD reported that it spent $307,000 to detain the men for over a month at the Djibouti base."

Military personnel and installations are not the only Department of Defense tools being used in novel ways to conduct immigration enforcement this year.

"Before this administration, military aircraft appear to have never been used for deportations. Now,
DoD has conducted deportation flights and detainee transfers for ICE using C-17 and C-130 aircraft,
which are significantly more expensive to operate than civilian aircraft," shared the report. "According to U.S. Transportation Command (USTRANSCOM), the military command that oversees transportation operations, as of April 8, 2025, USTRANSCOM had 'flown a total of 46 flights on military aircraft in support of migrant deportation flights.' At an average cost of $26,277 per flight hour, those 46 flights totaled an estimated $21 million — in just over 11 weeks — not including the additional costs associated with aircraft maintenance...As of the end of September 2025, the Trump administration had used military aircraft to conduct at least 88 deportation stops along 63 flight routes. Assuming an estimated average of 10-hour flight times each way, at an average cost of $26,277 per flight hour, the Trump administration has spent at least $33.1 million of DoD funds to deport noncitizens on these military flights."

The image below from Thursday's Senate report details the funds diverted from Department of Defense that have been confirmed so far.

"Diverting the military from its existing missions and thrusting it into immigration enforcement does not
make Americans safer. This multi-billion-dollar political stunt is an overt waste of taxpayer resources
and undermines national security, military readiness, and resources for our servicemembers," concluded Thursday's Senate report. "[F]orcing the military to participate in a divisive agenda may have long-term impacts on the military’s non-politicized nature and its credibility with the American public — impacts that could linger long after this administration.