Guantanamo ICE Detention Costs $40 Million in 1st Month, Padilla Calls Spending ‘Exorbitant’

The Trump administration’s move to detain people for Immigration and Customs Enforcement at the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, has cost taxpayers $40 million in its first month, according to U.S. Sen. Alex Padilla, D-Calif., who called the price tag “exorbitant.”

Padilla said the administration only disclosed the cost information after he and several other senators traveled to Guantanamo last Friday. As the ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Border Security and Immigration, Padilla joined top-ranking members of the Armed Services, Foreign Relations and Homeland Security committees on the oversight trip.

On the day of the senators’ visit, 87 people were detained at the facility, according to Padilla’s office. The Department of Homeland Security estimates that each detention bed at standard ICE facilities costs about $165 per day. At that rate, holding 87 people for a month in the U.S. would total about $430,000 — a fraction of the $40 million spent at Guantanamo.

“It’s a huge waste of taxpayer dollars,” Padilla said of the Guantanamo operation. “It was done without any significant planning or preparation, simply to give Donald Trump the talking point or the soundbite that he wants. It’s irresponsible, it’s reckless and it undermines due process.”

Homeland Security and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials did not respond to KQED’s request for comment.

Sen. John Cornyn, the chair of the Senate Judiciary’s immigration subcommittee, also did not respond to a request for comment on the senators’ trip to Guantanamo.

A significant portion of the cost stems from the use of military personnel for detention operations rather than ICE officials or their contractors. Padilla said that if Trump and his senior adviser Elon Musk are serious about rooting out waste and abuse in government spending, this is a “prime candidate for their attention.”

He added that many of the service members there were redeployed on very short notice, taking them away from other “critical missions.”

Before the trip, Padilla and other Democratic senators wrote in a letter to Trump (PDF) that immigrant detention on foreign soil is “unprecedented, unlawful, and harmful to American national security, values, and interests.”

During the visit, Padilla discovered that nearly half of the 87 people in detention were held in a low-security facility, undermining the administration’s claim that only the “worst of the worst” violent criminals were being sent to Guantanamo.

“Every question we asked led to more and more questions. It became clearer and clearer throughout the day that this was very much a ‘ready, fire, aim’ sequence of events,” Padilla told KQED. “They’ve been doing this for more than a month-and-a-half now, and there’s still some very basic infrastructure that hasn’t been put in place … whether it’s housing, whether it’s affording migrants access to counsel or basic communications.”

Immigrant rights and civil liberties groups have filed at least two lawsuits against the Trump administration, calling the transfers to Guantanamo illegal and unconstitutional (PDF) and charging that detainees have been held incommunicado (PDF) without the ability to contact their lawyers or family members.