By President Donald Trump’s plan to use the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, to detain 30,000 immigrants has been hitting major legal, logistical and financial hurdles ever since he surprised many in his own administration by announcing it. Now, as agencies spar over responsibility for operations there and over blame for what has gone wrong, there is a growing recognition within the administration that it was a political decision that is just not working.
Among the major issues, especially as the Trump administration works to slash spending throughout the government, is the cost. Taking detained immigrants to Guantánamo means flying them there, and the administration has sometimes chosen to use military planes that are expensive to operate.
On Tuesday of last week, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth was on hand at Guantánamo when a military C-130 carrying nine immigrants landed at the base. The Defense Department calculates the cost per flight hour to operate a C-130 at $20,756, so for a trip of five to six hours, it cost the Pentagon $207,000 to $249,000 round trip, or $23,000 to $27,000 per detainee.
The first plane of detained migrants arrives at Naval Station Guantánamo Bay on Feb. 4. Chad McNeeley / Defense Department via AFP via Getty Images file
Costs for those flights are lower when charter planes that Immigration and Customs Enforcement typically uses for deportation flights are employed in place of the military aircraft. But the administration has opted for military planes for reasons of optics, according to a defense official. When charter planes are used, the operation is still a heavy logistical and financial lift, especially compared with keeping the detainees on the mainland. Each flight includes at least one ICE official for every migrant, often more, as well as a medical team. ICE estimates the average cost of one of its regular charter flights at $8,577 per hour and the cost for “special high-risk charter” flights at $6,929 to $26,795 per hour, but those figures include “flight crew, security personnel, an onboard medical professional and all associated aviation handling and overflight fees,” which the Defense Department estimates for the C-130 do not.
And the space planned to hold the 30,000 immigrants is far from ready. Tents built for that purpose lack air conditioning and running water and do not meet ICE standards for detention, according to the defense official and an additional defense official.
The two U.S. defense officials and a congressional official said views within the administration about how viable an option Guantánamo is for holding thousands of immigrants have shifted, though Trump still wants the plan to move forward. The officials said it has become clear since Trump announced the Guantánamo plan that other options, including holding migrants at Fort Bliss, Texas, and other military bases in the United States would be cheaper and more efficient. A scaled-down version of Trump’s Guantánamo plan seems the likeliest outcome, the officials said.
As the mission at Guantánamo is changing, the Pentagon is also discussing bringing home some of the more than 1,000 U.S. troops who were surged to Guantánamo in the first days after Trump’s announcement, according to two other U.S. defense officials.
Military flights carrying immigrants to Guantánamo are also slowing down. There is no official order or guidance suspending those flights to the base, but there have not been any since Saturday, and none are scheduled for the rest of the week, those two defense officials said. The Wall Street Journal was first to report the lack of flights.
At the peak of its use during the Trump administration thus far, Guantánamo held 178 immigrants, all Venezuelan men. On Feb. 20, the Trump administration cleared out all of those detainees, sending 177 back to Venezuela via Honduras and one back to detention inside the United States. Though administration officials have consistently said the people being sent to Guantánamo are the “worst of the worst,” 51 of the 178 were considered to be non-criminal, meaning they had committed no crime other than being present in the United States unlawfully, according to a Department of Homeland Security official. As of Monday, 20 people were being held there, according to two other defense officials.
This article is based on interviews with about a dozen people familiar with the situation at Guantánamo and the dynamics inside the administration over it. All spoke on the condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to talk with the media.
The departments of Defense and Homeland Security did not respond to requests for comment.
Asked for comment, Kush Desai, a White House spokesman, provided a statement saying: “President Trump received a resounding mandate from the American people to implement his agenda of mass deporting criminal illegal migrants. The Trump administration remains aligned on delivering on that mandate and re-establishing a no-nonsense enforcement of and respect for the immigration laws of the United States — ICE arrests skyrocketing 627% and border crossings nosediving by over 90% compared to the Biden era reflect the administration’s commitment to keeping President Trump’s promise to the American people.”
Trump’s plan had problems from the moment he announced it on Jan. 29, when it was far from finalized.
Trump took many top officials in his administration by surprise when he made the announcement at a bill-signing ceremony. It was the first some had heard that a decision had even been made to send migrants to Guantánamo, according to a DHS official and the congressional official. No plans for how detaining 30,000 migrants at Guantánamo would work had been crafted by the agencies that would play roles in it, namely DHS and the Pentagon, according to the congressional official and the two defense officials.
The naval base was not close to being equipped to hold the 30,000 migrants Trump said it would. At the time of Trump’s announcement, it could hold only a tiny fraction of that, according to two former Biden administration officials familiar with the capacity limits.
A power struggle between the military and ICE, which is part of DHS, quickly ensued over who would be responsible for interacting with migrants once they arrived at Guantánamo, according to the two defense officials and a DHS official.
Facing a budget shortfall even before Trump was sworn in, ICE has been struggling to meet the stepped-up pace of arrests and deportations Trump wants. The acting director the administration put in place was reassigned last month, after Trump and border czar Tom Homan expressed anger that the number of people being deported is not higher.
Oversight of the operation fell to ICE’s Miami field office because members of the military cannot legally interact with immigrants in detention, the two defense officials noted. But staffing there was in short supply, the congressional official and the DHS official said. ICE leadership needed the agents who would be sent to oversee detainees at Guantánamo back on the mainland making arrests.
The military, concerned that it would be blamed if the effort failed, initially surged resources to Guantánamo, according to the two defense officials. The Pentagon sent roughly 1,110 troops and support personnel along with equipment to support the mission even though it had not yet received clear policy guidance outlining its role, the officials said.
Members of the military started setting up thousands of tents but without clear guidance about what the tents need to meet ICE standards for holding immigrants, the two defense officials said. They said that the military had expected to get a memorandum of understanding with details about the tents as early as last Friday but that it still has not received specific guidance. The military does not have the money to pay for those changes or upgrades, and no one has ordered it to make or pay for them yet, the officials said. (Under long-standing federal court settlements, immigration detention cannot be punitive, and it must adhere to certain humanitarian standards.)
DHS sent only one staffer to oversee detention operations and seven contractors when the first migrants started arriving at Guantánamo, and it did not send more until after the first three planes of migrants had arrived, the two defense officials said.
With a continued lack of resources, the military started bringing in more staffing to support the mission, including cooks, doctors and administrative staffers, the defense officials said.
For several weeks, DHS did not send any interpreters to Guantánamo, and members of the military provided those services for immigrants there, the two defense officials said.
The memorandum of understanding in the works would cover operations at Guantánamo going forward, one of the defense officials said. But both defense officials said it is unclear who will reimburse the military for the money it has spent on the effort so far, including flights.
Beyond the problem of the cost of the military flights, the explanation some members of Congress have received from military commanders about the Defense Department’s rationale for the legality of those flights’ carrying immigrants “seemed like reverse engineering them to be legal,” said a congressional official who spoke to officials with ICE and the military’s Southern Command.
Some congressional Democrats believe the military flights rest on shaky legal ground. Typically, the congressional official said, the Defense Department’s standard procedure is to render an opinion that an activity is legal before it begins. In this case, the congressional official said, the Pentagon is relying on a DHS memo that says DHS legal counsel has interpreted its own policies to allow the military to conduct those flights. The Pentagon has yet to generate its own interpretation of that law that has been communicated to any of the military forces involved in the Guantánamo effort, the official said.
Three weeks ago, amid the issues at the base, a bipartisan group of congressional staffers planned to travel to Guantánamo to survey the operation. But the trip was abruptly canceled by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who said the area was not ready to accept the delegation, according to a congressional aide who planned to attend. The trip has not been rescheduled.
Hegseth himself did visit the base last week, bringing along friendly media: his former Fox News colleague Laura Ingraham.
