WASHINGTON, DC — U.S. Senators Gary Peters (D-MI), Ranking Member of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, and Alex Padilla (D-CA), Ranking Member of the Senate Judiciary Immigration Subcommittee, called for a review of the exorbitant costs of the Trump Administration’s use of the United States Naval Station Guantánamo Bay (GTMO) to detain immigrants. In a letter to President Donald J. Trump, the senators highlighted the nearly $40 million in taxpayer dollars that was spent in a matter of months for the migration operations mission and called for the President to direct the U.S. DOGE Service Temporary Organization (USDS) to investigate this spending. The letter follows an official delegation visit the senators joined to conduct oversight of the operations at the base in March.
“In line with your commitment to maximize governmental efficiency and productivity, we are writing to encourage you to direct your Administration to address the tens of millions of dollars a month being spent on the unprecedented actions to fly immigrants from the United States and detain them at Naval Station Guantánamo Bay (GTMO),” wrote the senators. “While no one disagrees, that violent criminals should be deported, this mission is operating under questionable legal authority, undermines due process, and is unsustainably expensive – wasting millions of dollars of taxpayer money.”
The senators continued: “The outrageous spending of the migration operations mission at GTMO comes at a time when your Administration has indiscriminately moved to terminate thousands of federal employees across the government at the behest of DOGE under the guise of eliminating waste. Therefore, we request that your Administration review the extent to which the migrant operations at GTMO, including flights and detention, have and will impact agency operations and contribute to waste, fraud, and abuse.”
It has cost $40 million dollars to house individuals at GTMO over the past three months, where the prison currently has a capacity of 180 detainees. In contrast, existing DHS facilities on the mainland have a capacity of 41,500 detainees, costing between $125 to $200 a day. In addition to these alarming operation figures, the Administration has wasted $3 million on tent structures built for detention that were later deemed unsuitable and abandoned. The Administration has also funneled excessive resources into transportation, with military aircraft costing between $20,000 and $28,500 per flight hour to move immigrants to GTMO, only for them to be returned to the continental United States days later. Additionally, approximately 1,000 government personnel, including 900 military service members, have been assigned to GTMO migrant detention operations, diverting critical resources from national security and core agency missions.
The senators are calling for the Administration to act immediately to end this wasteful spending, and to launch an immediate full-scale review of these recent efforts on immigration enforcement migrant operations in GTMO and evaluate whether such actions violate the law, agency policies or procedures, and whether these decisions create additional waste and inefficiency.
Full text of the letter is available here.
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