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.
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.