(WASHINGTON) — The southwestern border mission and the detention operations at Guantanamo Bay have cost close to $330 million through mid-March, according to a U.S. official familiar with information briefed to Congress, as President Donald Trump attempts to fulfill his campaign promise to crack down on illegal immigration in the United States.
The deportation flights and detention operations at Guantanamo Bay, which only held a few hundred detainees at its peak, have cost nearly $40 million of that total.
There are only a few dozen deported migrants currently being held at Guantanamo Bay.
The estimated costs of the operations at the border and at Guantanamo Bay have not been previously reported.
The costs of the southwestern border operation are expected to continue to rise now that additional active-duty forces have continued to move to the border, where there are now more than 10,000 active duty troops as part of the mission on the border with Mexico.
Additional costs will likely include those associated with the new deployments of two U.S. Navy destroyers to that mission.
As of March 12, 2025, the military services had provided a total of $328.5 million in support for the border mission, including deportation flights and deployments to the border, according to a U.S. official familiar with the information briefed to Congress. Of that total, $289.2 million was for border security operations and $39.3 million was for the operations at Guantanamo Bay.
The cost at Guantanamo Bay is extremely high given the only several hundred detainees have been sent there — even though Trump had said tent cities there could hold as many as 30,000 deported migrants.
“There’s a lot of space to accommodate a lot of people,” Trump said of using Guantanamo Bay to house migrants on Feb. 4 after he signed an executive order to send migrants there on Jan. 29. “So we’re going to use it. … I’d like to get them out. It would be all subject to the laws of our land, and we’re looking at that to see if we can.”
Detainees with criminal records were housed at the detention facility that had been used to house enemy combatants from the War on Terror, and others were placed at the Migrant Operations Center that could only house 50 migrants.
Plans called for a tent city adjoining that migrant facility to be built that could house the numbers mentioned by Trump and other senior administration officials.
However, operations have come nowhere close to that as the phased construction initially envisioned building tent facilities for 2,500 people — but only 195 tents capable of housing 500 people have been built. And they have not been used at all because they did not meet U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention standards, such as including air conditioning.
On Friday, a delegation of Senate Democrats visited the migrant detention operations at Guantanamo Bay and later criticized what they called the “scale and wastefulness of the Trump Administration’s misuse of our military.”
“The staggering financial cost to fly these immigrants out of the United States and detain them at Guantanamo Bay — a mission worth tens of millions of dollars a month — is an insult to American taxpayers,” Democrats on the Senate Armed Services Committee, who sponsored the visit, said in a statement.
“President Trump could implement his immigration policies for a fraction of the cost by using existing ICE facilities in the U.S., but he is obsessed with the image of using Guantanamo, no matter the cost,” it added.
ICE has its own fleet of chartered aircraft that are used for deportation flights that cost about $8,577 an hour, according to its website. In contrast, the flights to Guantanamo Bay were conducted on C-130Js and C-17s.
The U.S. Transportation Command said it costs $20,000 per flight hour for C-130Js and $28,500 per flight hour for C-17s — and a one-way flight Guantanamo from El Paso, Texas is about 4 1/2 hours on a C-17 and six hours on a C-130J, allowing costs to add up quickly.
U.S. Transportation 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 civilian flight coordinated by ICE, the first detainees to arrive there since the earlier removal of all 41 detainees at Guantanamo Bay to a detention center in Louisiana.
In late February, the 178 detainees at Guantanamo Bay at that time were flown out, with 176 returning to their home country of Venezuela and two others returned to the United States.
Copyright © 2025, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.
