The southwest border mission and detention operations in Guantanamo Bay have cost about $ 330 million to mid -March, according to an American official familiar with the information informed to Congress, while President Donald Trump tries to fulfill his campaign promise to take energetic measures against illegal immigration in the United States.
Deportation flights and detention operations in Guantanamo Bay, which only had a few hundred detainees at a peak, have cost almost $ 40 million of that total.
There are only a few dozen deported migrants who are currently in Guantanamo Bay.
The estimated costs of operations on the border and in the Bay of Guantanamo have not been previously informed.
A photo published by the National Security Department of the first flight of migrants who were part of the Train of Aragua, preparing to take off for the Bay of Guantanamo, on February 4, 2025.
DHS
It is expected that the costs of the southwest border operation continue to increase now that the additional active duty forces have continued to move to the border, where there are now more than 10,000 active service troops as part of the mission on the border with Mexico.
Additional costs will probably include those associated with the new implementations of two Navy destroyers of the USA. UU. To that mission.
As of March 12, 2025, military services had provided a total of $ 328.5 million in support for the border mission, including deportation flights and deployments on the border, according to an American official familiar with the information informed to Congress. Of that total, $ 289.2 million were for border security operations and $ 39.3 million went to operations in Guantanamo Bay.
The cost in Guantanamo Bay is extremely high since the only hundred detainees have been sent there, although Trump had said that the cities of the store there could have up to 30,000 deported migrants.
“There is a lot of space to accommodate many people,” Trump said about the use of Guantanamo Bay to house migrants on February 4 after he signed a Executive order To send migrants there on January 29. “So we are going to use it … I would like to get them out. Everything would be subject to the laws of our land, and we are seeing that to see if we can.”
A armored vehicle of the eight -wheeled strikers is stored next to a signal that says in the “limits of the United States of Mexico, patrolling the border area in Sunland Park, New Mexico, as seen from Ciudad Juárez, state of Chihuahua, Mexico, on March 28, 2025.
Herika Martínez/AFP through Getty Images
Those arrested with criminal records were housed at the detention center that had been used to accommodate the enemy combatants of the war against terror, and others were placed in the migrant operations center that could only house 50 migrants.
The plans requested a city of tents adjacent to that migrant installation that will be built that could house the numbers mentioned by Trump and other senior administration officials.
However, the operations have not approached that, since the gradual construction initially imagined construction tent facilities for 2,500 people, but only 195 tents have been built capable of hosting 500 people. And they have not been used at all because they did not find the standards of detention of immigration and customs compliance with us, such as including air conditioning.
On Friday, a delegation of Senate Democrats visited migrant detention operations in Guantanamo Bay and then criticized what they called the “scale and waste of the misuse of the Trump administration of our military.”
“The amazing financial cost to fly to these immigrants outside the United States and stop them in Guantanamo Bay, a mission that is worth tens of millions of dollars per month, is an insult for US taxpayers,” the Democrats of the Senate Armed Services Committee said in a statement, which sponsored the visit.
“President Trump could implement his immigration policies due to a cost fraction through the use of existing ice facilities in the United States, but is obsessed with the image of using Guantanamo, regardless of the cost,” he added.
The members of the US military post. UU. Near the border wall that separates Mexico and the United States, in San Diego, California, on March 21, 2025.
Mike Blake/Reuters
ICE has its own fleet of rented aircraft that are used for deportation flights that cost around $ 8,577 per hour, according to its website. In contrast, flights to Guantanamo Bay were held in C-130Js and C-17.
The US Transport Command said that it costs $ 20,000 per hour of flight for C-130Js and $ 28,500 per hour of flight for C-17, and a single-sense flight guantanamo, Texas, is approximately 4 1/2 hours in a C-17 and six hours in a C-130J, which allows the costs to be quickly added.
The United States transport command has also carried out deportation flights to Honduras, Guatemala, Ecuador, Peru, India and Panama. The most recent military flight occurred on Friday, when a military deportation flight landed in Guatemala.
ABC News reported last week that 21 deported migrants had been sent to Guantanamo Bay aboard a civil flight coordinated by ICE, the first detainees to get there since the previous extraction of the 41 detainees in the Bay of Guantanamo to a detention center in Louisiana.
At the end of February, the 178 arrested in the Bay of Guantanamo at that time were fly, and 176 returned to their country of origin in Venezuela and two others returned to the United States.
