The original efforts of President Donald Trump to stop illegal immigration and smuggling along the southern border are receiving a lot of media attention, but their wider strategy involves using maritime routes along the coasts.
The president issued a number of executive orders aimed at securing the frontier, including one that called for the declaration of a state of emergency, while the military deployed thousands of troops to help Customs and Border Protection carry out those directions.
The Coast Guard and a specific division of CBP called Air and Marine Operations are in charge of keeping an eye on the waters off the U.S. shores to stop people and illegal substances being smuggled into the country.
The Texas-Mexico boundary is most frequently overlooked when it comes to illegal immigration, but the waterways along the U.S. coastlines are much more expansive to track.
In the early days of the Trump presidency, then-acting Secretary of Homeland Security Benjamine Huffman relieved the Coast Guard captain, Adm. Linda Fagan, from her place. She was replaced by Adm. Kevin Lunday, who had been serving as the evil captain, in an operating power.
According to a senior official from the Department of Homeland Security, one of the reasons Fagan was given the job was expected to “insufficient cooperation with the Department of Homeland Security to prioritize activities along sea borders.”
Lunday surged resources to aid in the quest of deterring improper immigration and trafficking and said,” We will detect, deter,  , and arrest illegal movement, drug trafficking,  , and additional terrorist or hostile action before it reaches our boundary”.
” The U. S. Coast Guard is the world’s leading maritime law enforcement agency, essential to protecting America’s sea borders, regional dignity, and sovereignty”, he added. ” Per the president’s executive orders, I have directed my functional commanders to quickly surge assets — cutters, aircraft, ships, and scalable professional causes — to increase Coast Guard presence”.
Lunday specified that they would focus on Florida’s coasts, Alaska, Hawaii, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, American Samoa, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands, and the maritime borders between the Bahamas and south Florida, the United States and Mexico in the Pacific, and along the Gulf of Mexico, which Trump has pushed to be renamed the Gulf of America.
The Coast Guard has publicly announced four different interdictions of vessels that appear to be carrying migrants hoping to illegally enter the United States since Trump’s inauguration.
The Coast Guard detained a vessel carrying 16 people of Mexican nationality about 15 miles off Mission Bay, near San Diego, last weekend. Additionally, the Coast Guard stopped another vessel with 21 passengers on board the day before in the same area after a panga with 14 people who claimed Mexican nationality was approximately 20 miles off the coast of Point Loma, California, on January 29.
Coast Guard officials said they interdicted a different vessel carrying 26 people 1 mile offshore from Oceanside Harbor on Jan. 21, the day after Trump’s inauguration. The people on that ship identified as being of Mexican, Chinese, and Vietnamese nationalities.
Nearly 12, 000 immigrants, the majority of whom were Cuban or Haitian, were interdicted by the Coast Guard’s Homeland Security Task Force- Southeast in fiscal 2023. According to CBP data, members seized 233, 662 pounds of illegal drugs in fiscal 2024, which is lower than the 304, 435 pounds of drugs that were seized the year before.
The military has pursued autonomous sea-based vehicles because of the vastness of the waterways close to U.S. borders.
In addition to teaching other theaters lessons, Southern Spear will operationalize a heterogeneous mix of robotic and autonomous systems to support the detection and monitoring of illicit trafficking. Foster Edwards, 4th Fleet’s hybrid fleet director. Southern Spear will continue to transition from short-duration experiments to long-duration operations that will help develop crucial methods and procedures for integrating RAS into the maritime environment.
In order to increase maritime domain awareness, U.S. Naval Forces Southern Command made the announcement in late January that it would deploy long-dwell robotic surface vessels, small robotic interceptor boats, and vertical take-off and landing robotic aircraft to its area of responsibility.
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Saildrone, one of the businesses involved in these endeavors, has created autonomous sailboats that appear to be similar to those found in sailboats. For Operation Southern Spear, an expansion and continuation of Operation Windward Stack, the company is providing 20 of these drones.
” Saildrone is proud to support our nation’s critical border security efforts”, said Tom Alexander, vice president of government relations. ” Traffickers will exploit maritime pathways more than ever as land borders become more secure. We’re honored to serve, providing autonomous around-the-clock maritime surveillance to help stop smugglers before they reach our shores”.
