Last month, the Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC) adopted its version of the Fiscal Year 2027 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). Under the leadership of Chairman Roger Wicker (R-MS), the SASC bill makes important strides in strengthening hemispheric defense. By putting additional focus on national security threats in Latin America, the Senate version of the NDAA would deliver long-overdue congressional defense attention on this critical region.

The Trump Administration’s 2026 National Defense Strategy put security in the Western Hemisphere alongside protecting the homeland on the list of the Pentagon’s top strategic priorities. The NDS comes in response to escalating threats to the American people and U.S. strategic interests close to home. These include narco-terrorist groups challenging state control and moving deadly drugs in Mexico, Colombia, and other U.S. partner countries, China’s growing activity and influence, and enduring anti-American regimes in Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. Focusing more attention on these threats can come at a relatively low cost in military and budgetary terms while delivering direct benefits to the American people.

A state that loses the capacity to screen at its own gates does not contain the consequence within its own borders. Canada’s immigration bureaucracy is now creating a security problem not only for Canada, but for the United States.

For two centuries, Washington has benefited from an assumption it rarely had to inspect: that the Canadian state could competently govern its own gate. The northern border was not treated as a major strategic vulnerability because the two countries operated on a quiet premise. Whoever Canada admitted, regularized, naturalized, or failed to remove was generally not someone the United States needed to screen again as a primary threat.