WASHINGTON — 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.

But first, the House had to fix a drafting error that could have prevented not just the Coast Guard, but all the military services from buying combat drones and weapons for those aircraft — something neither party’s leadership wanted to see happen.

None of the funds “in this Act or any other act,” the Homeland Security bill initially said, “may be used to procure or acquire long range unmanned aircraft with kinetic capabilities or to equip any long-range unmanned aircraft with kinetic capabilities.”

That language would have applied to Defense Department drones and their weapons, even as the Pentagon is planning to spend billions of dollars building up its unmanned forces as it seeks to leverage operational lessons from the Ukraine war and to contend with breakneck Chinese drone production.

When the error was caught, the House separately adopted an “engrossment correction” by unanimous consent to change the language in the just-passed spending package, after the Homeland bill was combined with five other appropriations measures, including the Defense bill.

The corrected language now reads: “None of the funds made available for the Department of Homeland Security in this or any prior Act” may be used to buy or equip armed drones.

That change was made to ensure the provision referred only to DHS, and wouldn’t prevent the Pentagon from being able to purchase armed drones, a second source familiar with the issue said.

Guardians of the sea

Last summer’s budget reconciliation law provided $266 million for the Coast Guard to buy unmanned aircraft “for the security of the maritime border.”

The agency has yet to give Congress full details on its plans for spending the money, but has said publicly that the reconciliation funds would buy four MQ9-B drones for the Coast Guard to supplement joint operations with Customs and Border Protection, a sister DHS agency.

The pending fiscal 2026 DHS funding bill would bankroll two additional MQ-9B drones for $98 million. None of these aircraft are armed with missiles.

House appropriators had inserted the $98 million into their earlier version of the Homeland Security appropriations bill, but without the prohibition on armed variants that was later added in conference negotiations.

“These aircraft provide a cost-effective platform to improve high-seas interdiction and maritime rescue,” the report accompanying the House bill said. The report added that the Coast Guard’s duties patrolling the northern Atlantic Ocean for iceberg dangers could be entirely replaced by long-range drones.

In contrast to the unarmed DHS drone fleet, the Pentagon operates MQ-9A Reaper versions of the aircraft, which can carry a variety of missiles and bombs weighing up to 3,750 pounds. The ones that struck alleged drug-runners at sea in recent months reportedly flew out of Puerto Rico.

San Diego-based General Atomics, which makes the MQ-9 drones, contributes to members on both sides of the aisle through individual donations and its political action committee.

Top recipients in the 2024 campaign cycle, according to OpenSecrets.org, include Rep. Pete Aguilar, D-Calif., the House Democratic Caucus chair, and Rep. Ken Calvert, R-Calif., chairman of the House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee.

Drone swarms

The Pentagon’s unmanned aircraft lineage was launched in the 1994 Defense spending law. It was an earmark authored by Rep. Jerry Lewis, R-Calif., who died in 2021. His provision created the Predator surveillance drone, the precursor to the MQ-9 drones.

For fiscal 2026, the Pentagon said in June it plans to spend $13.4 billion on autonomous and remotely operated systems for use at sea, on land and in the air.

The highest-profile Defense Department armed drones include not just the Reaper but also the Army’s Gray Eagle, the Air Force’s Global Hawk and the Navy’s Triton.

The Air Force is developing so-called Collaborative Combat Aircraft, which are unmanned systems that would fly as “loyal wing men” alongside manned fighter jets.

Newer programs include not only new unmanned aircraft and the missiles they can fire, but also drones that can be used as defensive assets against enemy unmanned systems.

Future battlefields, experts say, are likely to be characterized by swarms of thousands of offensive and defensive drones on both sides of a fight, with most if not all of them eventually commanded at the tactical level by artificial intelligence.

With one late stroke of the pen on Thursday, the House may have preserved all this potential unmanned destructive power — if the Senate ultimately goes along.

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(Daniel Hillburn contributed to this report.)

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