Source: United States Senator for Rhode Island Jack Reed
WASHINGTON, DC – Over the past three months, the Trump Administration has surged military personnel to the Southwest Border, Guantanamo Bay, and the U.S. southern coasts. The Administration has spent nearly $500 billion and engaged tens of thousands of troops, Navy warships, armored combat vehicles, and military aircraft in its immigration enforcement operation.
On Thursday, U.S. Senator Jack Reed (D-RI), Ranking Member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, spoke on the Senate floor to address the unprecedented and likely illegal use of the U.S. military in domestic law enforcement.
A video of Senator Reed’s remarks may be viewed here.
A copy of Senator Reed’s letter to the Department of Defense Office of Inspector General may be viewed here.
A transcript of Senator Reed’s floor speech follows:
REED: Mr. President, I rise to address President Trump’s dangerous and inappropriate use of the U.S. military to carry out his immigration enforcement campaign.
Before I discuss the Trump Administration spending nearly half a billion dollars and sending tens of thousands of troops, ships, combat vehicles, and aircraft away from their real missions, I want to make clear that border security is a priority. I do not support open borders. And I believe that those who enter the United States and break our laws should be subject to deportation in accordance with the law and due process. I have voted time and time again for billions of dollars of increased support for border agents, detection technology, and physical barriers where it makes sense.
Mr. President, it is no secret that our borders have been under pressure for more than a decade because of a broken immigration system that Congressional Republicans have consistently refused to help fix. We have considered bipartisan immigration reform bills in 2006, in 2007, in 2013, and in 2024, all of which were shut down by Republicans. The mess that we have today rests largely on their decision to put political advantage above real progress.
Now, President Trump is ignoring Congress, ignoring the law, ignoring the Courts, and ignoring the Constitution in order to implement an immigration policy that fails to respect due process, adversely impacts our innovation economy, and to the point of my remarks, degrades our military. In the name of his anti-immigrant efforts, President Trump is using the U.S. military to conduct operations on American soil that it has neither the training or authority to carry out. Our troops, who are already stretched thin for time and resources, are now burning time, assets, morale, and readiness for these overblown operations.
The President has declared an emergency at the border to justify using the military for civilian law enforcement. This, despite border encounters currently at the lowest level since August of 2020. Over the past 12 months, since President Biden’s executive actions last June, there has been a continued, significant decrease in unlawful border crossings – including a?more than 60 percent decrease in encounters?from May 2024 to December 2024.
In short, all along the Southern Border we have seen a dramatic drop in illegal crossings and migrant encounters, well before President Trump took office. A national emergency? It seems not.
We already have an entire federal agency to protect our borders and address illegal immigration: the Department of Homeland Security. DHS includes Customs and Border Protection, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and other law enforcement groups. I have voted consistently to give these agencies additional resources to carry out their missions. But immigration enforcement is not, and must not become, a function of the Department of Defense.
Our military has long provided technical and logistical support to DHS at the border, but always and exclusively in a supporting role, drawing a clear line between military law enforcement authorities. Indeed, since the Reconstruction Era, U.S. presidents have been prohibited from using the military in civilian law enforcement by a law known as the Posse Comitatus Act. This law has kept the commander-in-chief from wielding the military as a domestic political weapon, and it continues to provide an important check on the President’s ability to use the military domestically against American citizens.
I understand American citizens asking if it matters which Department enforces immigration, as long as the job gets done. Well, there are plenty of reasons to be concerned by the President’s current approach, even if one agrees with him politically.
Most alarmingly, President Trump is taking real steps to militarize immigration enforcement. Once he uses the military for this reason, it will be easier for him to use it for other purposes. And given the tenor of his public statements, it is a reasonable fear that he may someday order the use of the armed forces in American cities and against American citizens.
Indeed, the Brennan Center – a law and public policy institution – recently analyzed President Trump’s military actions at the border and concluded, quote: “Using the military for border enforcement is a slippery slope. If soldiers are allowed to take on domestic policing roles at the border, it may become easier to justify uses of the military in the U.S. interior in the future. Our nation’s founders warned against the dangers of an army turned inward, which can all too easily be turned into an instrument of tyranny.”
Beyond these concerns, there are real, immediate consequences for our troops, which we are seeing right now.
Readiness
One of the military’s top priorities is readiness. America faces real, growing threats from China, Russia, Iran, and other adversaries, and the Department of Defense needs to be laser focused on preparing troops to defend our interests abroad.
It is difficult to explain the border missions as anything but a distraction from readiness. We should acknowledge the jobs that our troops are actually doing there. In the past, up to 2,000 National Guard and Reserve troops would rotate to the border each year to assist DHS and Customs and Border Patrol with basic monitoring, logistics, and warehousing activities. These missions were designed to be “behind the scenes” logistical support to free up Border Patrol agents from administrative duties and return them back to the field to conduct their core mission of immigration enforcement.
Today, however, Trump has surged more than 12,000 active-duty troops to the border to carry out a variety of expanded missions that do not look anything like “behind the scenes” administrative support. For example, one Marine battalion has been stringing miles and miles of barbed wire across the California mountains. Multiple Army infantry companies are patrolling the Rio Grande riverbank on foot, rifles loaded. Navy aircrews are flying P-8 Poseidons – the most advanced submarine hunting planes in the world – over the desert. Two Navy destroyers are loitering off our East and West Coasts, looking for migrant boats in the water. And at least one Army transportation unit is changing the oil and tires on Border Patrol trucks all day, every day.
In addition, the Administration has wasted massive amounts of defense dollars by flying migrants out of the country using military aircraft. Often, they have had to return them to the United States mainland just days later. According to U.S. Transportation Command, it costs at least $20,000 per flight hour to use a C-130 and $28,500 per flight hour to use a C-17. In comparison, contracted ICE flights that regularly transport migrants inside of the U.S. cost only $8,500 per flight hour. President Trump’s decision to use military aircraft instead of ICE aircraft to shuttle migrants across the globe—to as far away as India—is a gross misuse of taxpayer dollars and servicemembers’ time.
Just yesterday, we learned that the White House wanted to fly migrants, on military aircraft, to Libya, which is one of the most dangerous, hostile locations on earth. Human rights groups have called the conditions in Libya’s network of migrant detention centers “horrific” and “deplorable.” The plan has been cancelled for now, but it is unconscionable for the Trump Administration to consider sending migrants to Libya and endangering our troops in the process.
Further, the Department of Defense has informed Congress that the current surge in border missions—including troop deployments and military flights—could cost as much as $2 billion by the end of the fiscal year. Secretary Hegseth has claimed that the border mission is so overwhelming that we will have to withdraw massive numbers of troops from Europe in order to meet the demand. Incredibly, he has also claimed that the border missions will have “no impact” on our military readiness.
However, we know that these border missions are harming military readiness. Last month, when the NORTHCOM commander testified before the Armed Services Committee, I asked how his forces on the border mission are maintaining their required military training. He testified that his troops are spending 5 days a week supporting Customs and Border Patrol and other agencies, and only 1 day a week training. In other words, 20 percent – at most – of our servicemembers’ time is being spent training on their critical military tasks.
In my personal engagements with commanders at all levels, they have made clear that readying their formations requires extensive time and training, as well as stability for families. Border missions will not build these warfighting requirements. Border missions will distract from training, drain resources, and undermine readiness. The Government Accountability Office, or GAO, has assessed previous military support missions to DHS and found them to be detrimental to unit readiness. Specifically, in its 2021 report, GAO found that, quote, “separating units in order to assign a portion of them to the Southwest Border mission was a consistent trend in degrading readiness ratings.”
Guantanamo Bay
In February, President Trump issued an unprecedented order to the Defense Department to begin transporting and detaining migrants at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. For decades, the U.S. Naval Station at Guantanamo Bay has housed a facility called the Migrant Operations Center that is used to temporarily house migrants who are saved at sea while traveling in unsafe vessels from Cuba, Haiti, or other nearby nations. The facility is typically unoccupied and is kept in a low-level operational state until needed and, until February, it was run by private contractors. The intended use for this center was never to house migrants flown from the United States to Guantanamo Bay.
Nonetheless, President Trump ordered the military to expand the Migrant Operations Center to accommodate up to 30,000 migrants who would be brought there from the United States. Within weeks, approximately 1,000 active-duty troops were sent to Guantanamo to build tents for this massive number of migrants. However, once built, the tents were found not to meet ICE standards and, to date, they have never been used and are now being dismantled. The hundreds of troops sent down for the mission have had very little to do in the meantime.
Since February, around 500 individuals identified by the Administration as illegal migrants have been flown to Guantanamo Bay, and most have been detained for no more than two weeks. Rather than being taken to the Migrant Operations Center, about half of these migrants have been held on the other side of the island at the detention facility that was built and used for law of war detainees – such as 9/11 terrorist Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
There are currently 15 law of war detainees remaining on Guantanamo Bay. The facilities housing these detainees have deteriorated significantly in the 20 years since they were built, and the military personnel who guard these individuals also endure the same tough conditions in these dilapidated facilities. Needless to say, these servicemembers have been stretched thin. Last fall, it was a significant morale boost for them when the remaining law of war detainees were moved to a “newer” facility. Naturally, it was a blow to morale when, just one month later, they were ordered back to the older, more decrepit facility to make way for migrants at the newer facility.
While it is crystal clear that the military is in charge of the law of war detention center at Guantanamo Bay, it is not clear who is legally responsible for the migrants being held there. Longstanding law dictates that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement maintain “custody and control” of migrants, but in the detention center, the military maintains control. This leads to questions about who is in charge and accountable. When I have asked those questions, the answers have often been contradictory. That’s disturbing.
To investigate these issues, I traveled to Guantanamo Bay in March with several colleagues, including Senators Shaheen, Peters, King, and Padilla. We conducted a firsthand examination of the missions underway there and met with military servicemembers, ICE officers, and DHS officials to fully understand the costs and military readiness impacts of these missions. This trip raised many new questions and concerns.
I have grave doubts about the legality of removing migrants from the U.S. to Cuba, a foreign nation, and detaining them there. There are at least a dozen open cases and court orders impacting the Guantanamo mission. The detention center has only been used for law of war detainees, and it is reckless to equate migrants with international war criminals.
I was outraged by the scale of wastefulness that we found there. It is obvious that Guantanamo Bay is an illogical location to detain migrants. The staggering financial cost to fly these migrants out of the United States and detain them at Guantanamo Bay—a mission costing tens of millions of dollars a month—is an insult to American taxpayers. President Trump could implement his immigration policies for a fraction of the cost by using existing ICE facilities in the U.S., but he is obsessed with the image of using Guantanamo, no matter the cost.
I am also frustrated that my Senate colleagues and I had to fly to Cuba to get answers to the questions that Defense Secretary Hegseth and Homeland Security Secretary Noem have been ducking for months. By avoiding questions, they are putting servicemembers and officers on the ground in the position of trying to make sense of contradictory and political orders without any guidance or support from the Pentagon or DHS headquarters.
Domestic Law Enforcement
Since coming into office, the Trump Administration has expanded the role of the military in immigration enforcement in other troubling ways. The movement of migrants from the U.S. to Guantanamo Bay is unprecedented, and the buildup of 12,000 active duty troops at the Southern Border, including the Army’s 10th Mountain Division and 100 armored Stryker combat vehicles, has a huge impact on our military posture. This is a larger force than we deployed to Afghanistan in 2002 and 2003.
This Administration has purposely placed many of our military forces into the immigration debate in this country, and I fear it will also place them in legal and ethical risk.
For example, on March 30th, a military flight traveled from Guantanamo Bay to El Salvador with foreign nationals on board, including seven Venezuelans. To my understanding, not a single DHS official or civilian was on the flight, meaning that military personnel maintained both custody and control of the migrants, contrary to longstanding DOD policy and practice.
Here is an image of that plane unloading in El Salvador. As you can see, the crew does not include any DHS officials or civilian law enforcement personnel – only uniformed troops, who are physically handing migrants to the Salvadoran police.
This flight would clearly have been in violation of various immigration laws and policies, recent judicial orders, and the Posse Comitatus Act, as the military carried out a core law enforcement function of deportation without any DHS officials present. After the fact, the Administration tried to explain itself by saying it used, quote, “counter-terrorism” authorities rather than law enforcement authorities. I am not aware of any counter-terrorism authorities that would authorize such a flight.
Accordingly, last month I sent a letter to the Department of Defense Office of Inspector General asking that office to conduct an inquiry into the incident and any laws or Defense Department policies that may have been violated. I expect the IG to exercise his independence in carrying out this inquiry, and I am disturbed that the Administration continues to put servicemembers in legal and physical jeopardy through these reckless orders. Mr. President, I would submit that letter for the record.
I am also concerned about the Trump Administration’s dubious creation of “National Defense Areas” along the Southern Border in recent weeks. These National Defense Areas, first designated in New Mexico and later expanded into Texas, were created when the Department of Interior transferred land, including the Roosevelt Reservation—a 60-foot-wide strip along the border—to the Department of Defense. So now, large swaths of the border are considered military installations. The Administration has created these zones so that when a migrant crosses the border in those areas, prosecutors can charge them with both entering the U.S. illegally and trespassing on a military installation. In effect, the National Defense Zones evade the long-standing protections of the Posse Comitatus Act by allowing military forces to act as de facto border police, detaining migrants until they can be transferred to Customs and Border Protection. In the Administration’s telling, this approach permits military involvement in immigration control without invoking the Insurrection Act of 1807.
This is both unprecedented and a legal fiction. As the Brennan Center report found, quote: “No matter how the Trump administration frames these activities… they are civilian law enforcement functions. He cannot turn them into military operations by misusing the language of war. These civilian law enforcement activities are not “incidental” — they are the reason for creating the installation.”
The Administration is also considering using military bases to detain thousands of migrants inside the United States. Unlike in past emergencies, when military bases near the border were used to hold migrants during large surges, this administration is seeking to use installations deep within the country, including in New Jersey, Indiana, Delaware, California, and Virginia. One could be forgiven for extrapolating that these bases are being selected to hold round-ups of migrants in major cities.
The President is not taking these military actions out of necessity; he is testing the boundaries of our legal system, and, in my view, violating them. If left unchecked and unchallenged, he will go much, much further in employing the armed forces in to enforce domestic immigration laws, traditionally a civilian law enforcement function.
For years, Mr. Trump has publicly expressed his desire to use U.S. military personnel for domestic law enforcement. During the last campaign, he repeatedly claimed that, if elected, he would order the National Guard and active-duty military to carry out mass deportations of undocumented migrants. He even said that he would deploy the military to conduct local law enforcement in cities, and that troops could shoot shoplifters leaving the scene of a crime.
Trump’s defenders often say that he is joking or exaggerating when he makes such claims. But we know these are not idle threats. In his first 100 days in office, he has declared multiple national emergencies and invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport migrants without due process. Indeed, he has even unapologetically deported U.S. citizens in violation of the Constitution. We have all seen the chilling videos of masked and hooded ICE agents arresting civilians on the street – scenes we are accustomed to seeing on the nightly news in countries run by dictators. The Administration is expanding its operation one step at a time, and President Trump’s deployment of forces to the border, the military deportation flights, and the establishment of National Defense Areas can be interpreted as setting the stage to invoke the Insurrection Act and order the military to carry out domestic law enforcement inside the country.
In fact, we have seen this situation before. In June 2020, then-President Trump, infuriated by protesters in front of the White House and across the country, ordered his staff to prepare to invoke the Insurrection Act to allow him to deploy active-duty military forces to patrol the streets of DC and other cities. Then-Defense Secretary Mark Esper and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley talked him out of it, but the President clearly views this as a serious option.
Beyond the immorality of Trump’s desire to deploy the military domestically, to do so would simply be illegal. As I mentioned, the doctrine of Posse Comitatus is sacred in our nation to separate the military from direct law enforcement responsibilities.
The use of National Guard or active-duty troops should be reserved only to those rare circumstances where civilian law enforcement has collapsed, and state leaders have specifically asked for presidential assistance. Their deployment should never be at the sole discretion of a President, as Trump has demonstrated that such power begs abuse.
Ultimately, U.S. military members are trained to engage the enemies of the United States abroad with deadly force, not to arrest migrants on the Southern Border or to deport them from U.S. cities. The military has a sacred role in our country, but the public’s trust is easily lost, and a pillar of our society is cracked when the commander-in-chief uses the military recklessly.
Our constitutional system is fundamentally designed to separate military and civilian roles, reserving police powers for law enforcement agencies, and endowing the military with the superior weaponry and firepower necessary to fight and win the nations’ wars. When we allow the military to be used in the routine exercise of the police power, the nation teeters on the brink of autocracy and military rule. One need not be a student of history to see how easily this backsliding can occur. It is all around us in the world today.
Trump’s clear intent to use the U.S. military in potentially illegal and certainly inappropriate ways for his own political benefit is antithetical to the spirit of our American democracy. Such power is the hallmark of authoritarians around the world.
President Trump and Secretary Hegseth must use common sense, follow the law, and immediately cease the military border deployments and deportation flights. And my colleagues, particularly my colleagues in the majority, should demand the same and hold the Administration accountable for its actions.
I yield the floor.