“Blackwater on the Border”

For most of the twentieth century, the military’s formal role in border enforcement was limited, in part due to a long-standing federal statute that bars the United States military from enforcing domestic laws (a doctrine Trump has been accused of flouting in recent weeks). This began to change in the 1980s with the war on drugs, which offered a pretext for lawmakers to authorize military collaboration with immigration authorities, ostensibly to crack down on drug trafficking.

In the decades since, the US southern border has become ever more militarized. The Department of Defense, through decades-old operations like Joint Task Force North, collaborates directly with immigration authorities. National Guard troops have regularly been deployed to the southern border.

But some provisions in this year’s National Defense Authorization Act, the annual must-pass defense spending bill, would further entrench the military’s role at the border. And the bill would, for the first time, allow the Department of Defense to outsource its border security work to private contractors.

The language authorizes the Defense Secretary to enter into contracts in order to “secure the southern land border of the United States,” including for the provision of intelligence analysis, surveillance, and transportation.

This provision was added to the bill as an amendment in a July committee hearing by Rep. Pat Fallon (R-TX), who defended it to fellow lawmakers as a “commonsense” cost-saving measure. The military is already involved in all sorts of border operations, Fallon explained, and “many of these roles currently filled by military personnel could be filled by contractors for, here’s the key, a fraction of the cost.”

Fallon claimed the Department of Defense had proposed a similar measure under the Biden administration. The agency, he said, estimated that outsourcing its border operations roles — “logistics, monitoring, transportation, data entry, and more” — would save the military hundreds of millions a year.

Yet despite Fallon’s lip service to savings, critics say such a provision would likely be a windfall for the defense industry.

“It’s just another stream of money for companies,” said William Hartung, senior research fellow at the nonprofit Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, which analyzes defense policy and spending. Among the firms poised to benefit, he said, are Palantir and Anduril, two defense contractors that work closely with the Department of Homeland Security on border surveillance.

Other defense contractors like Boeing and Lockheed Martin already take in hundreds of billions from the Pentagon; the agency paid out an estimated $2.4 trillion to its private vendors between 2020 and 2024, more than half of its discretionary spending. The cash flow has, in turn, created a powerful lobby that is constantly looking to expand opportunities to drain the government’s coffers.

Fallon has received tens of thousands in campaign contributions from defense industry firms, including, just this year, thousands from RTX, Lockheed Martin, and General Dynamics, three of the Pentagon’s biggest vendors.

Fallon’s amendment drew some opposition from Democrats on the House Armed Services Committee. Rep. Sara Jacobs (D-CA) warned at the hearing that the provision would “grant the Pentagon open-ended authority to hire troops and private military contractors for routine border enforcement,” as well as divert even more federal dollars to border operations amid Trump’s historic immigration enforcement spending blitz.

Despite protests from Jacobs and others, the amendment passed and was included in the final bill that passed by the House in a 231-196 vote on September 10, winning the support of seventeen Democrats.

The Senate has not yet passed its own version of the legislation, and recent versions of the bill, Hedtler-Gaudette said, did not include a twin provision. This leaves open the possibility that the proposal could be excised in a final version.

If Fallon’s amendment does end up in the final bill, critics worry the provision could open a Pandora’s box.

“It’s pretty novel,” said Hedtler-Gaudette of the Project on Government Oversight. The Pentagon has a long history of working with unaccountable defense contractors, particularly overseas, he explained. Now, this could be a situation of “Blackwater on the border,” he said, referencing a private military contractor accused of war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Elizabeth Goitein, the codirector of the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, warned that if such a provision were enshrined into law, it might be difficult to roll back.

“Inviting private companies into border security efforts would create a powerful lobby for perpetuating this unprecedented and ever-expanding level of border militarization that we are seeing under this administration,” she said. This would make it “much harder to bring that level back down in the future.”

Other provisions in the House bill would also expand the Pentagon’s role in border operations, including one provision that would bolster the Department of Defense’s ability to collaborate with agencies like the Department of Homeland Security on “counterterrorism” operations, further entrenching the military in domestic law enforcement operations.