About a week into his second term as president, Donald Trump announced a plan that he seemed rather excited about. Reversing several years’ worth of progress, the Republican began a process that would detain tens of thousands of migrants at the U.S. military camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
The Republican assured the public that the facility would detain “the worst criminal illegal aliens,” and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth insisted soon after that Guantánamo Bay was “a perfect place” for migrants.
In hindsight, perhaps “perfect” wasn’t an ideal choice of words. The Washington Post reported:
The Trump administration has removed all the migrants who were being held at the Guantánamo Bay Naval Station in Cuba and flown them back to the United States, a Defense Department official said Wednesday. The 40 men have been transported to Louisiana, where there is a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Alexandria. It comes two weeks after the U.S. Department of Homeland Security sent another group of 48 migrants back to the same city from Guantánamo.
The article dovetailed with a related report from The Wall Street Journal that noted there are still hundreds of U.S. troops guarding an empty and unused tent city, although they’ll soon be redeployed. The Journal added, “The operation has so far cost at least $16 million, according to lawmakers who recently toured the naval base.”
There are several recent examples of the Trump administration reversing course and abandoning controversial ideas, but in nearly all of those instances, those reversals came in response to court rulings, political pressure, embarrassing news coverage or some combination thereof.
The collapse of Trump’s Guantánamo Bay policy, however, is qualitatively different: The administration is backing down, not because of a judge or public backlash, but because its own officials grudgingly acknowledged the unavoidable fact that the misguided policy was a poorly thought-out disaster.
As NBC News reported last week, “[A]s agencies spar over responsibility for operations [at the base] 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.” The report added: 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.
There is no reason to spend American taxpayer money so ridiculously. I realize that the camera-ready trips made for a few dramatic segments on Fox News, but there was no substantive or security need for these incredibly expensive flights. The entire policy was mired in bureaucratic and logistical challenges from the outset, which was probably inevitable given that the entire idea apparently stemmed from one of Trump’s hollow impulses and subjected to no serious governing analysis. This isn’t the White House’s only fiasco, but when drawing up a list of head-shaking debacles, be sure to keep Guantánamo Bay near the top.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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