The southwest border mission and detention operations in Guantanamo Bay have cost nearly $ 330 million until mid -March, according to a US official who is familiar with the information given to the Congress, when President Donald Trump tried to fulfill his campaign promises to crack down on illegal immigration in the United States.
Flight deportation and detention operations in Guantanamo Bay, which only arrested a few hundred prisoners at its peak, the price was almost $ 40 million of the total.
There are only a few dozen migrants deported which are currently detained in the Gulf of Guantanamo.
Estimated operating costs at the border and in Guantanamo Bay have never been reported before.
A photo issued by the Department of Domestic Security from the first flight migrants who are part of the de Aragua trend, preparing to take off for the Guantanamo Bay, February 4, 2025.
DHS
The cost of southwest border operations is expected to continue to increase now because additional active task force continues to move to the border, where there are now more than 10,000 active task troops as part of the mission on the border with Mexico.
Additional costs will likely include related to the new distribution of two US naval destroyers for the mission.
On March 12, 2025, military service gave a total of $ 328.5 million support for the border mission, including deportation flights and distribution to the border, according to a US official who was familiar with information given by the congress. Of the total, $ 289.2 million was for border security operations and $ 39.3 million was for operations in Guantanamo Bay.
The cost in Guantanamo Bay is very high considering that only a few hundred prisoners have been sent there – although Trump said the tent cities there could hold as many as 30,000 deported migrants.
“There is a lot of space to accommodate many people,” Trump said about using the Guantanamo Bay migrant to accommodate February 4 after he signed an AN Executive command to send migrants there on January 29. “So we will use it. … I want to issue it. It will all be subject to the law of our land, and we see it to see if we can.”
An eight -wheeled armored vehicle stands next to a sign that sounds at the Spanish limit ‘United States’ Mexico,’ patrolling in the border area in Sunland Park, New Mexico, as seen from Ciudad Juarez, the state of Chihuahua, Mexico, on March 28, 2025.
Herika Martinez/AFP via Getty Images
Prisoners with criminal records are placed in detention facilities that have been used to accommodate enemy combatants from the war against terror, and others are placed in the migrant operating center which can only accommodate 50 migrants.
The plan to call for a tent city next to migrant facilities to be built that can accommodate the numbers mentioned by Trump and other senior administration officials.
However, the operation did not approach it because the gradual construction was initially imagining building tent facilities for 2,500 people – but only 195 tents that were able to accommodate 500 people had been built. And they have not been used at all because they do not meet the immigration standards and enforcement of our customs, such as AC.
On Friday, the Democratic Senate delegation visited the migrant detention operation in Guantanamo Bay and then criticized what they called “the scale and waste of abuse of Trump’s government against our military.”
“Surprisingly financial costs to fly these immigrants came out of the United States and arrested them in the Gulf of Guantanamo – a mission worth tens of millions of dollars a month – was an insult to American taxpayers,” Democrats at the Senate Armed Service Committee, which sponsored the visit, said in a statement.
“President Trump can implement an immigration policy for a small portion of the cost using ice facilities in the US, but he is obsessed with the image of using Guantanamo, no matter the cost,” he added.
Members of the US military holder near the border wall separating Mexico and the United States, in San Diego, California, March 21, 2025.
Mike Blake/Reuters
ES has its own rental fleet used for deportation flights that cost around $ 8,577 per hour, according to the website. Conversely, flights to Guantanamo Bay are conducted on C-130JS and C-17.
The US transportation command says the price is $ 20,000 per hour of flight for C-130JS and $ 28,500 per hour flight for C-17 and one-way flight Guantanamo from El Paso, Texas around 4 1/2 hours with C-17 and six hours with C-130J, which allows costs to increase rapidly.
The US transportation command has also carried out deportation flights to Honduras, Guatemala, Ecuador, Peru, India and Panama. The latest military flights occurred on Friday, when military deportation flights landed in Guatemala.
ABC News reported that last week that 21 deported migrants were sent to Guantanamo Bay on a civilian aircraft coordinated by ICE, the first prisoner who arrived there since the previous transfer from 41 prisoners in the Gulf of Guantanamo to the Detention Center in Louisiana.
At the end of February, 178 prisoners in Guantanamo Bay at that time were flown, with 176 back to the country of origin of Venezuela and two others returned to the United States.