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Housing migrants at Guantanamo Bay costs as much as $100,000 per inmate, per day, a U.S. senator has claimed, describing the set-up as “outrageous.”
The astonishing figure may mean that President Donald Trump’s use of the naval base in Cuba costs almost 1,000 times more than housing people in U.S. immigration facilities – which is $165.
The claims were made by Senator Gary Peters of Michigan during a hearing of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee on Tuesday, in which he and other members grilled Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem.
Peters, the top Democrat on the committee, decried the use of the facility as a prime example of wasteful government spending, highlighting that the Trump administration’s irrational shuttling of prisoners back and forth had also been at U.S. taxpayer expense.
"We're spending $100,000 a day to keep someone at Guantanamo," Peters complained. "We keep them there awhile, then we fly them back to the United States, or we could keep them here for $165 a day. I think that's kind of outrageous."
It comes after the White House requested a huge increase in funding for immigration enforcement as it continues its attempt to further Trump's goal of mass deportations.
Earlier this month the administration asked Congress to boost the Department of Homeland Security budget by nearly $44 billion for the 2026 fiscal year, which begins on October 1.
Noem, who appeared before the committee on Tuesday to defend the budget request, said she did not know the daily cost to house migrants at Guantanamo Bay.
At another point during Tuesday’s hearing, Noem stunned members of the committee by appearing not to understand the fundamental American right of habeas corpus – which the White House is threatening to suspend.
Habeas corpus allows people to challenge the legality of their detention, and has been a constitutional right in the United States since 1789.
Noem claimed the opposite, saying that habeas corpus “is a constitutional right that the president has to be able to remove people from this country.”
New Hampshire Democratic Senator Maggie Hassan, who had asked Noem to define the concept, responded flatly: “That is incorrect.”
She added: “Habeas corpus is the legal principle that requires that the government provide a public reason for detaining and imprisoning people ... [it] separates free societies like American from police states like North Korea.”
Roughly 70 migrants are currently detained at the infamous Cuban facility at Guantanamo Bay, according to a U.S. official, who spoke to Reuters on condition of anonymity,
The Guantanamo Bay detention camp, established in 2002 at the US Naval Station in Cuba, was created to detain terrorism suspects and "illegal enemy combatants" as part of the post-9/11 "war on terror."
The American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit in March to prevent 10 migrants from being transferred to the base. In the suit, ACLU alleged that migrants at Guantanamo had been held in windowless rooms for at least 23 hours per day, subjected to invasive strip searches, and unable to contact family members.
Reuters contributed to this report.
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