Peters blasts 'crazy' daily cost of detaining migrants at Guantanamo Bay
After visiting the U.S. military base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, U.S. Sen. Gary Peters on Monday blasted the Trump administration for what it's costing to fly and detain migrants there for deportation.
Peters, the top Democrat on the Senate Homeland Security panel, had visited the base on Friday as part of a delegation of five Democratic senators. He said it's costing the government about $20,000 a day per migrant detained at the base at Guantanamo Bay, noting that most of them are "not the high-risk people."
"I think that's crazy. We have a lot of top high-security prisons in the United States that doesn't cost $20,000 a day," Peters said Monday during an event hosted by the Detroit Economic Club.
Peters said that, while the senators were there, 14 migrants flew in on a 737 jet who were expected to remain a couple of weeks before being flown back to Louisiana and later deported to countries in Latin America. "I'm like, could you just keep them in Louisiana?" Peters said.
He added that he would be writing a letter to tech entrepreneur Elon Musk and his cost-cutting DOGE team about the situation.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security didn't immediately respond Monday to a request for comment.
The day-long delegation to Guantanamo was led by Sen. Jack Reed of Rhode Island, the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, who told The New York Times this week that the Pentagon has estimated the Guantanamo Bay operation had cost $40 million in its first month, with about 1,000 U.S. government employees staffing the operation.
While about 400 migrants have been flown to the base, fewer than 90 migrants were being detained there Monday, The Times reported.
Guantanamo is possibly best known for hosting the foreigners associated with the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Peters traveled to the Caribbean naval base with Reed as well as Sen. Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, the top Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee; Democratic Sen. Alex Padilla of California; and Sen. Angus King of Maine, an independent who caucuses with Democrats.
In a joint statement the senators released over the weekend, they said they met with military service members and officials with DHS and Immigration and Customs Enforcement during their visit, but they were angry that they had to fly to Cuba to get answers to the questions they’ve been asking for months.
The five senators urged the Trump administration to cease the "misguided" mission, calling it "unsustainably expensive" and harmful to military readiness, as staff there had been detailed from their regular assignments.
“After examining the migrant relocation activities at Guantanamo Bay, we are outraged by the scale and wastefulness of the Trump Administration’s misuse of our military,” the senators wrote. “It is obvious that Guantanamo Bay is a likely illegal and certainly illogical location to detain immigrants. Its use is seemingly designed to undermine due process and evade legal scrutiny.”
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Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who was assigned to Guantanamo Bay when he was on active duty in the Army National Guard, has called it a “perfect place” to house migrants.
"Some of them are so bad that we don’t even trust the countries to hold them because we don’t want them coming back, so we’re gonna send ’em out to Guantanamo,” Trump said in late January. “We have 30,000 beds in Guantanamo to detain the worst criminal aliens threatening the American people."
Peters on Monday said he supports the deportation of undocumented immigrants "who have done bad things."
"They got to go," he said. "But it's a question of how you do it. Can we do it in a cost effective way?"
Peters at the Detroit Economic Club was responding to questions from the moderator, Detroit News Editorial Page Editor Nolan Finley, who had asked about Musk and the DOGE cost-cutting effort. Peters said he supports reducing the deficit but in a thoughtful way.
"How it's been implemented, just kind of across the board in an indiscriminate way ... doesn't make sense to me," Peters said.
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Peters also offered the example of mass firings of federal workers who were in their probationary period, noting that many of those were not the newest employees but long-time staff who had been promoted to supervisory positions, for example.
"Can you imagine that all of our business folks here, you tell your employees, 'You're a great employee; I'm going to promote you, and then I'm going to fire you. Congratulations,'" Peters said. "Makes no sense whatsoever."
During Monday's economic club meeting, Peters also discussed the anticipated impact of Trump's tariff regime; the future of electric vehicles; the safety of the northern border; Peters' ideas for bringing all U.S. government manufacturing programs under one umbrella; and the regulation of artificial intelligence.
mburke@detroitnews.com
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This article originally appeared on The Detroit News: Peters blasts 'crazy' daily cost of detaining migrants at Guantanamo Bay
