The Trump administration is taking the unusual step of deploying a Navy warship off the waters of the U.S. as part of its broader crackdown on security and migration along the Mexico border.
The destroyer USS Gravely departed for the deployment on March 15 and will have a Coast Guard law enforcement detachment aboard that will better enable it to conduct missions such as ship seizures and drug interdictions, according to a statement released by U.S. Northern Command over the weekend.
However, Pentagon officials did not offer more details as to why a Navy destroyer, and not a Coast Guard cutter, was chosen for the mission at the Defense Department’s first briefing under the Trump administration on Monday.
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Sean Parnell, the Pentagon’s top spokesman, told reporters that “this deployment directly supports U.S. Northern Command’s mission to protect our sovereignty” and that part of the Gravely’s mission will be to “secure those water routes in defense of our southern border.”
Lt. Gen. Alex Grynkewich, the operations boss for the Joint Staff, who was briefing alongside Parnell, said that the ship will “be involved in the interdiction mission for any of the drugs and whatnot that are heading in.”
Grynkewich added that the ship will be closely partnered with the U.S. Coast Guard.
Unlike a Coast Guard cutter, though, a Navy destroyer is a far more heavily armed vessel — the Gravely can carry 96 missiles, including Tomahawk Land Attack cruise missiles — and it is moving into the area after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth recently wouldn’t rule out conducting strikes into Mexico.
One defense official, who spoke with Military.com on the condition of anonymity, said Northern Command did notify Mexican counterparts that the ship would be off their coast through internal channels.
Another official suggested that the move was far more about the dramatic visual of a warship operating off the Mexican coast than the need for any of its more advanced weapons and capabilities.
The Trump administration has already utilized military assets for dramatic visuals on several occasions — only to halt after concerns over cost or efficacy were raised.
Both the administration’s efforts to use military flights to deport people it claimed to be in the country illegally and the use of Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, as a detention center have run into issues.
The flights raised questions about cost at a time when the administration was also pushing massive government cuts in the name of efficiency.
Efforts to use the naval base at Guantanamo Bay to house tens of thousands of immigrants have yet to materialize because the tents that service members were directed to set up were not meeting habitability requirements.
President Donald Trump announced plans to use Guantanamo Bay to hold around 30,000 migrants, but last week defense officials said that there were only 60 detainees on the remote military installation in Cuba, none of whom were being housed in the tents service members were recently ordered to set up.
Meanwhile, the Gravely has been back in the U.S. for less than a year.
The ship returned from a storied and dramatic deployment to the Middle East in July. While in the Middle East, the destroyer had its deployment extended twice, for a total of nine months away from home.
The Gravely faced one of the greatest threats that the Navy has publicly acknowledged during the deployment. The ship shot down a missile using its Close-In Weapon System, or CIWS — a gatling gun system that is one of the vessel’s last lines of defense — after it came within a mile of the destroyer in January 2024.
Officials at the Pentagon and Northern Command wouldn’t say how long they planned to have the destroyer patrolling the waters off Mexico.
Northern Command’s statement said the ship would operate in international waters, as well as within 12 miles of the U.S. coast.
Related: Trump Wants to Detain 30,000 Migrants at Guantanamo Bay. It Can Hold Only 130 Now.
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