Spending bill would block DHS from arming long-range drones
Source: Roll Call
Posted January 26, 2026 at 5:39pm
Even as the Trump administration has increasingly militarized the job of enforcing drug and immigration laws, Congress last week took a quiet, bipartisan step to restrain that trend. House and Senate negotiators writing a compromise Homeland Security spending bill were concerned enough about the possibility the department might consider arming a new fleet of Coast Guard drones with missiles that the negotiators wrote into the bill a provision to bar such a move. The language had not been in the earlier House or draft Senate versions of the bill.
Outrage about the killing of Alex Pretti by Homeland Security Department personnel in Minneapolis on Jan. 24 has all but doomed the chances the Senate will clear the final DHS spending bill this week — or possibly at all. Still, if a rewritten version of the bill does move forward, the language on armed drones would probably not change.
The Coast Guard operates smaller drones and, thanks to a new injection of money from Congress, is in the process of buying its first models of the larger, long-range MQ-9Bs to assist with maritime border protection.
Congressional aides said the Coast Guard has shared no plans to put missiles on any of these MQ-9Bs of the sort that the U.S. military has fired from similar aircraft against alleged drug-smuggling boats in the Caribbean since September. Negotiators writing the compromise DHS funding bill wanted to keep it that way. They inserted into the measure a prohibition on the Coast Guard buying missile-bearing drones, or armaments for them, “to reflect a desire to keep the status quo,” one aide said. ;
Read more: https://rollcall.com/2026/01/26/spending-bill-would-block-dhs-from-arming-long-range-drones/
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