President Donald Trump’s use of the Guantanamo Bay naval base to house migrants appears to cost $100,000 per day for each detainee, U.S. Senator Gary Peters said during a hearing on Tuesday, decrying what he described as a prime example of wasteful government spending.
Peters, the top Democrat on the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, questioned Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem about the high cost, far more than the $165 per day in U.S. immigration detention facilities. Peters also asked why detainees have been sent to the American naval base in Cuba but then shuttled back to the United States at taxpayer expense.
A U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said there were roughly 70 migrants currently detained there.
That’s currently 7 million dollars per day. WTF? I wonder how much they’re paying El Salvador to keep the deportees, some of them by mistake, in a place that no one is known to come out of.
So DOGE made us less safe and probably is killing people, but we’re spending 7 million dollars PER DAY (49 million per week=196 million per month) for 70 people.
Note: Again, thank you Reuters for reporting on this. I think you’re the only one.
This is VERY common. Keeping people locked up means you have to employ other people to keep an eye on them, maintain a facility, feed and clothe the people, etc etc. Not only are you depriving society of their value, you’re depriving society of everyone else’s value too.
The reason this is on another financial level is because it’s an extrajudicial prison on the shore of a country that the US legally can’t do business with.
I’m not familiar with Gitmo’s supply lines, but presumably everything needs to be shipped in directly to the base. This means the logistics are necessarily more frequent and by far less efficient than any prison logistics in America could ever be. The whole point of building an illegal torture prison there in the first place was to isolate it as much as possible.
All to line the pockets of the likes of Gaetz, MTG and the trump family.
I’ll take them in for $35 million per hostage per year and they’d be saving almost $2 million on each of them!
You’d actually be a better person than anyone in Doge and you’d treat them better.
I can’t believe I’m doing this but considering a friend was publically named before in a controversy over pricing, I struggle to take this number seriously. People often misinterpret things to the point that they skim a few emails and think it costs $100,000 to set up a board room but actually it’s that amount for several dozen board rooms which ended up being quite reasonable. That’s a true story (with modified numbers).
Honestly fuck the cost anyway, I’d be more concerned about the extra-judicial powers being used here.
I can’t believe you are either. A quarter of that would be way too much.
