The acting head of the Coast Guard told lawmakers Wednesday that resources were shifted from the Indo-Pacific region to help bolster President Donald Trump's efforts at securing the southern border.
Adm. Kevin Lunday testified during a hearing of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Homeland Security that the Coast Guard has so far conducted 157 expulsion flights to deport illegal immigrants, U.S. Naval Institute News reported. He said the Coast Guard also prevented more than 860 migrants from illegally entering the U.S. by sea and surpassed last year's totals in seizures of cocaine and other drugs.
Lunday was the Coast Guard's vice commandant until Jan. 21, when Trump fired Adm. Linda Fagan as commandant for failing to address border security and her focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion policies.
Under questioning from the subcommittee's ranking member, Rep. Lauren Underwood, D-Ill., Lunday said the Coast Guard had to cancel two missions, an operational deployment to the Indo-Pacific and a support mission to the Arctic Coast Guard Forum in Iceland, to shift resources to securing the border. He said he talked with Adm. Samuel Paparo, commander of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, before making the operational change and that the support mission "wasn't an operational [mission] ... I want to be specific and clear."
"We make those tough tradeoffs all the time because there is an increasing demand for Coast Guard resources and always a limited number of cutters, boats, aircraft crews to provide them," he said.
Lunday said the Coast Guard has seen changes in illegal activity at the border.
"When you squeeze or tighten down on one part of the land border ... we see elements of that flow or that vector try to make their way across other areas of the border," he said. "And so we're seeing an increase in activity off Southern California. And we see it in increased smuggling attempts, moving illegal migration and also drugs, trying to get those into not only San Diego but further up the coast, up toward Los Angeles as well."
He said that has resulted in an increased presence of the Coast Guard in those areas and brought the human cost of illegal activity closer to U.S. population centers. He cited the May 5 death of three people, including a minor, when the smuggling vessel they were in flipped in the surf off San Diego.
"And so these efforts are critical to not only protect our border but save lives as well," Lunday said. "So we do need increased and sustained top-line funding to be able to generate and sustain the assets, ships, cutters, boats, and aircraft and sensors necessary to enable us to protect that maritime approach to the U.S. border, off of California, off of Texas and the Gulf of America, and then off of Florida and the U.S. Virgin Islands."
Lunday said two Navy destroyers were supporting the Coast Guard mission off the coast of California, underscoring the limits of the service's resources. The service's nearly 56,000 active-duty and auxiliary members operate 259 cutters, 143 helicopters, 57 fixed-wing aircraft, and 1,602 smaller boats, according to its website.
"We're continually hampered by pressure for sustaining and operating our assets, our boats and our ships ... we're not able to maintain them at the rate we need to, and so they're not always as available as we need them to be when a mission demand occurs or an operational case is detected," he said. "On the southern border, we need increased investment and sustainment for more modern assets that we're able to repair and keep operating with greater availability."
Michael Katz ✉
Michael Katz is a Newsmax reporter with more than 30 years of experience reporting and editing on news, culture, and politics.
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