Project 2025's DOD–DHS Alignment Proposal: Border Militarization Through Defense Intelligence Integration

The source text calls for 'true alignment between DOD and DHS both to improve the defense of critical U.S. infrastructure and national border integrity.' This is not a neutral administrative efficiency proposal. Routing defense intelligence capabilities — including signals intelligence, human intelligence, and counterintelligence — through DHS toward the southern border treats migration as a national security threat equivalent to adversary hypersonics or Chinese whole-of-government strategies. That framing has legal and humanitarian consequences that the text does not acknowledge.

The Refugee Act of 1980 requires the United States to evaluate asylum claims on an individualized basis. Militarizing the intelligence architecture surrounding border arrival points does not accelerate that adjudication — it substitutes threat assessment for the statutory credible-fear screening that must precede any removal. Federal courts have already pushed back on executive branch attempts to bypass that process: as the Migration Policy Institute notes, judges during the current administration have halted or slowed initiatives including invocation of the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, precisely because categorical threat designations cannot substitute for individualized due process.

The same section of Chapter 5 that proposes DOD–DHS alignment also recommends developing 'statistical discrimination techniques based on relative value to deal with the volume and velocity of available data.' In its immediate context, that language targets adversary intelligence analysis. But once defense intelligence infrastructure is formally integrated with DHS border operations — as this proposal explicitly envisions — those methodologies travel with it. Applied to border populations, statistical discrimination becomes profiling: nationality, route of travel, or demographic markers as proxies for threat. The American Immigration Council's reporting on ICE and CBP authority expansion documents that this methodology is already operating without adequate legal constraint. Embedding it deeper into a DOD–DHS fusion structure would make it harder, not easier, to challenge through habeas or administrative review.

The concrete alternative is investment in the civilian adjudication infrastructure that statute actually requires: more immigration judges, more asylum officers, and more consular capacity to process claims before families undertake dangerous journeys. The Migration Policy Institute and former INS Commissioner Doris Meissner have both documented that backlogs — not insufficient military intelligence — are the primary driver of dysfunction at the border. Alignment between DOD and DHS for border purposes does not shorten the immigration court docket; it militarizes the queue.