President Trump has tapped the Pentagon for his immigration and border initiatives to a larger extent than any of his recent predecessors and the potential bills are piling up.
The military will likely be saddled with hundreds of millions of dollars in border costs for the deployment of thousands of troops and a border wall project.
But the Pentagon says it still has no complete estimates of exactly how much Trump’s ongoing initiatives aimed at stopping what he calls an immigration crisis and migrant invasion will cost or how they will be paid.
“The reason this is happening is we’ve created such a successful country, economically, that everybody is flooding into our country, or they want to. But we’re stopping them at the border, and that’s why we have our great military there,” Trump said on Friday.
The past two presidents have deployed National Guard troops to the U.S.-Mexico border. Those operations involved thousands of troops and ultimately cost more than $1.3 billion over three years.
As commander in chief, Trump has gone further and pressed the Pentagon to take up the border crackdown on multiple fronts, including an earlier abandoned plan to house migrant children on military bases.
More than 5,000 active-duty soldiers and Marines spent Veterans Day at camps along the border after Trump ordered the deployment just before the midterm elections. He also warned that a group of migrants in southern Mexico walking north toward the U.S. border posed a threat to national security.
The deployment is projected to grow to 7,000 and possibly higher. Without an official estimate, cost figures for the active-duty troops have varied wildly. Analysts and news reports have guessed between $60-$200 million, depending on the duration and number of troops.
“The [Defense Department] comptroller is reviewing DoD accounts to fund this mission with minimal disruption to readiness and other DoD missions,” a Pentagon spokesman said at the time of the deployment. No further budget details have since been released.
Meanwhile, Trump also has deployed about 2,100 National Guard troops to assist border authorities since April. The Guardsmen, just like the active-duty forces, are barred from taking part in any law enforcement activity and are relegated to supporting Customs and Border Protection with helicopters, medical care, stringing barbed wire, and other tasks that do not involve contact with illegal immigrants.
The first five months of the Guard deployment, which falls under the last fiscal year, is expected to cost $182 million for the personnel and flights by its UH-72 Lakota helicopters, according to the Pentagon.
No public estimate for the mission this fiscal year has been released by the Pentagon. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis renewed the Guard deployment in October and it could continue through much of next year.
One of the biggest costs for the Pentagon could be Trump’s order that Mattis build sections of his border wall, estimated by the military to cost $450 million.
The Department of Homeland Security sent the request in August for the military to construct a 30-foot barrier along the Barry Goldwater bombing range, straddling the Mexico border near Yuma, Ariz.
The Navy has tapped $11 million in the Pentagon’s operations and maintenance funds to do environmental planning work for the project, which comes a decade after the Bush administration paid about $122 million for barriers as part of a similar initiative.
The Pentagon said it is reviewing “authorities and funding options” to construct the new barriers.
