President Donald Trump’s administration is pausing military deportation flights and rethinking its use of Guantánamo Bay as a migrant detention center after realizing the financial and logistical toll involved.
In late January, Trump decided he liked the optics of using the detention center at the U.S. naval base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba—which was created to hold prisoners accused of terrorism—and signed an executive action instructing officials to maximize the site’s holding capacity.
The administration also decided to send a tough-on-immigration message by using military aircraft to fly detained migrants to Guantánamo and to deport them to India, Guatemala, Ecuador, Peru, Honduras, and Panama, among other countries, the Wall Street Journal reported.
“The message is clear: If you break the law, if you are a criminal, you can find your way at Guantánamo Bay,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said during a visit there last week. “You don’t want to be at Guantánamo Bay.”
Since Trump took office in January, officials have dispatched about 30 flights of migrants aboard C-17 aircraft and about a dozen flights using C-130s, the Journal reported. But they’ve found the military flights take longer routes, transport fewer migrants, and cost more than deportations on civilian aircraft.
Three military flights to India cost $3 million each, and some of the flights to Guantánamo cost $20,000 per migrant, the Journal found.
It costs $28,500 per hour to fly a C-17, compared with $8,500 to $17,000 per hour for a standard deportation flight.
Even standard flights are a major logistical and financial effort compared to keeping detainees on U.S. soil, NBC News reported. In addition to the flight crew, each flight needs at least one Immigration and Customs Enforcement official per migrant, plus a medical team.
The administration suspended the military deportation flights this month, according to the Journal, and officials are reconsidering whether it’s feasible to use Guantánamo at all, NBC reported.
The tents built at Guantánamo to house migrants don’t have air conditioning or running water, and they don’t meet ICE’s standards for detention, according to NBC.
Officials have realized it would be cheaper and more efficient to hold detainees at military bases in Texas and elsewhere in the U.S.
But Trump still wants to use Guantánamo to hold 30,000 migrants. Officials told NBC they thought a scaled-down version of the president’s original plan was the most likely outcome.
