Your tax dollars are being wasted on Trump’s bogus deportation flights
The American taxpayers have paid out at least $21 million to transport migrants to the U.S. military base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, between Jan. 20 (Donald Trump’s first day in office) and April 8. The information on the project, initiated by Trump, was released to Congress by U.S. Transportation Command, known asTRANSCOM.
Currently there are 32 migrants being held at the facility, notorious as a detention site for suspected members of the al-Qaida terrorist network and the Taliban extremists of Afghanistan. The facility has held under 500 prisoners in total and never more than a maximum of 200.
The number is a far cry from the 30,000 beds Trump in January instructed the Pentagon and the Department of Health and Human Services to prepare to hold migrants at the facility.
According to TRANSCOM, military flights have cost taxpayers $26,277 per flight hour for over 800 flights so far. The federal government has also paid out $21 million for Guantanamo Bay flights under Trump.
“Every American should be outraged by Donald Trump wasting military resources to pay for his political stunts that do not make us safer,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts said in a statement released Monday.
The administration has been under fire for high-cost anti-immigration initiatives that have generated more in the form of propaganda—images that the administration can push out and favorable news stories—that help concrete immigration policy. Last week, the Trump administration said it had promised to pay migrants $1,000 to uproot their entire lives and “self-deport.”
Some of the families of migrants that have been sent to Guantanamo Bay said they don’t have criminal records, despite the administration’s claims that the worst offenders would be sent to the facility. The American Civil Liberties Union is currently suing the federal government over the procedure.
“Never before have people been taken from U.S. soil and sent to Guantanamo, and then denied access to lawyers and the outside world,” ACLU lead attorney Lee Gelernt told ProPublica in February.
Despite the administration spin, the public has been retreating from backing Trump on immigration. The subject, previously one of his political strengths, now has more people responding to opinion polling opposed to Trump’s hardline position than for it.
In addition to the Guantanamo Bay expenditures, Trump is spending tax dollars to use immigration forces to abduct and detain college students for exercising their free speech. Trump also took Maryland man Kilmar Abrego Garcia from his home in the state and deported him to El Salvador, where he remains despite the federal courts instructing Trump to return him.
The Trump immigration plan is underperforming what he promised and ripping apart families at the same time.