Trump’s southern border military mission cost over $300 million in first 6 weeks

By Katie Bo Lillis and Natasha Bertrand, CNN

(CNN) — The Trump administration’s major military mission at the southern border focused on reducing immigration and drug flows has already cost taxpayers more than $300 million, according to sources briefed on data from the Defense Department comptroller — even as the administration has vowed to slash the size of government and cut 8 percent from the department’s budget.

In just the first month, the Pentagon spent roughly $250 million dollars, a source briefed on the cost and two other people familiar with the matter told CNN, including deportation flights on US military aircraft, the deployment of thousands of additional troops and the expansion of detention facilities at Guantanamo Bay.

As of March 12, it had spent $328 million. The DoD Comptroller briefed lawmakers on the costs earlier this month, the sources all said.

“We saw that and we were like woah – that’s high,” a defense official said.

If spending continues at the same pace — and it seems poised to do with the addition of two warships to the region and administration officials vowing to expand operations — it would put the military on track to spend more than $2 billion in the first year of operations.

“They’re drunk on [Overseas Contingency Operations] money,” another official said, referring to funding set aside for military operations that isn’t part of the base budget.

The cost of the military operation, not previously reported, underscores the Trump administration’s determination to move as quickly as possible to shift the enforcement of the US southern border — traditionally a domestic law enforcement function — into a military mission.

The total cost of the operation across the federal government remains unclear. Those figures do not include money spent by the Department of Homeland Security, the intelligence community and other agencies who have also surged government assets to the border, where President Donald Trump has declared a national emergency.

The administration sees those growing costs — which for now must be moved from other government programs because Congress has not directed new funding to the border — as necessary to combat what Trump has termed an “invasion” of migrants and fentanyl.

Under Trump, the intelligence community for the first time listed cartels as the first threat facing the country in its annual threat review. And Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, in a memo outlining his priorities for the Pentagon, labeled defending the US homeland from “unlawful mass migration, narcotics trafficking, human smuggling and trafficking” as the military’s “foremost priority.”

Critics argue that the Trump administration is inflating the nature of the threat relative to other priorities — like countering China and Russia or combatting terrorism — and that shifting military assets away from those efforts risks national security.

While the Department of Homeland Security has for years looked to the Pentagon for assistance in times of border crisis, the latest surge also comes against the backdrop of very few border crossings. Migrant crossings dramatically declined after an executive action by former President Joe Biden last summer that clamped down on asylum. They have continued to plummet, with only a couple of hundred people illegally crossing the US-Mexico border daily, according to Homeland Security officials.

Inside the military commands responsible for carrying out Trump’s strategy, officials say the ballooning mission is often throwing expensive defense resources at problems that either already had law enforcement solutions or weren’t a problem to begin with.

A number of high-profile initiatives have already been scaled back, either because they were too expensive to have the military do them or because they weren’t needed in the first place.

‘They’re not even building a plan’

“They’re not even building a plan. It’s almost, like, they’re just like, here’s more toys. Go do something,” the second defense official said.

Defense officials said the costs are only expected to rise as the Pentagon attempts to execute on Hegseth’s directive to make the border the “foremost priority,” potentially putting them beyond what was spent in Trump’s first administration, when annual spending on military activities at the border was estimated to have cost between $1 billion and $2 billion. ​

As of March 1, there were around 9,000 active duty troops at the border, according to US Northern Command. A second defense official said the troops have primarily been building barricades, putting up concertina wire, and generally “just standing around.”

The US military last week deployed two warships to patrol near the border, which will add significantly to costs. And it surged surveillance flights on the border and in international airspace around the Baja Peninsula beginning in February.

The administration has also been considering a plan to have Northern Command take command of a swath of territory along the border by designating it as a military installation, according to a source familiar with the planning.

Migrants who cross in this area would be put into “holding” for trespassing onto a military property, until the Department of Homeland Security could arrive to pick them up and deport them — putting the military in the position of effectively detaining migrants, something it is traditionally a law enforcement function. The military is prohibited from carrying out domestic law enforcement under the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act, but by describing the zone as a “holding” area, DoD could feasibly circumvent that law.

Meanwhile, a number of early efforts have sputtered.

Military deportation flights have slowed to a trickle because the Department of Homeland Security has not actually needed the large and expensive military C-17s to help transport migrants, multiple officials said. Only one military flight per week is taking off on average, holding a handful of migrants.

And the US Naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba—which Hegseth in January touted as a “perfect place” to hold as many as 30,000 migrants—is nearly empty. A significant portion of the 900 troops surged there last month to handle an influx of deportees could soon be sent home, officials said.

The deployments to the border are “clearly more about optics,” a defense official said.

CNN’s Priscilla Alvarez and Angelica Franganillo Diaz contributed to this story.

The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2025 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.