By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan
President Donald Trump and Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, have unleashed global chaos with mass firings and funding freezes as they attempt to eviscerate the US government. Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency, DOGE, has revealed significant problems – within its own operations, that is. This week Musk’s DOGE team quietly removed their top five posted cost savings, after journalists found, to put it mildly, major errors, like mistaking $8 billion for $8 million, or claiming $2 billion in savings instead of $18 million.
Meanwhile, one flagrant expense on the federal balance sheet, which should be zeroed out, is staring Musk in the face: the US naval base and prison complex at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
Shuttering Gitmo would save at least a half-billion dollars per year. These figures are based on dated estimates, and don’t include additional, classified amounts. The estimate still points to enormous waste: $500 million per year to house 15 prisoners, three of whom have been cleared for release. That amounts to over $91,000 per prisoner, per day. In 2022, the federal Bureau of Prisons reported the per person cost to incarcerate stateside was $43,000 per year, or about 0.1% of the cost at Guantánamo.
Clearly, Guantánamo should be closed primarily because it’s been run as a lawless, offshore dark site where countless innocent people have been held without charge for decades, where the government has tortured prisoners, and where presidents from both parties have imprisoned people virtually incommunicado, without due process or constitutional rights.
But when viewed with the cruel, fiscal logic that Elon Musk is now allegedly using to cut the federal bureaucracy, closing Gitmo is a no-brainer.
Except that the Trump administration has decided to jumpstart another of Guantánamo’s dark chapters, as an immigrant detention camp. On January 29th, Trump instructed the Departments of Homeland Security and Defense to “expand the Migrant Operations Center at Naval Station Guantánamo Bay to full capacity.”
President George H.W. Bush and President Clinton both used the base to jail migrants. In 1991, Haitians began fleeing the US-backed coup that deposed Haiti’s democratically-elected President Jean-Bertrande Aristide. Between 1991 and 1993, an average of 12,000 Haitian asylum seekers intercepted at sea were held daily at Guantánamo. Three-quarters of them were forcibly repatriated to Haiti, exposing them to violence or retribution.
In January 2002, as the George W. Bush administration was ramping up Guantánamo to hold prisoners in the so-called War on Terror, the late human rights attorney Michael Ratner of the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), speaking on the Democracy Now! news hour, described the conditions he encountered while representing asylum seekers in the early 1990s:
“The place is really a hell hole. It’s not that bad for the servicemen who have set up a McDonald’s and everything else on their part of the base, but where we were, a remote part of the camp, in a desert surrounded by barbed wire with detention facilities, really, in the heat and outside, it’s really unbearable.”
As the 1990s progressed, Guantánamo’s migrant prison population swelled to 45,000, as many Cubans caught at sea attempting to reach Florida were also held there.
CCR and other groups were able to challenge the post-9/11 legal black hole of Guantánamo, ensuring prisoners there accessed their constitutional rights. But Ratner’s description, more than 30 years on, is still accurate.
Guantánamo is now overseen by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who served there as a military officer from 2004-2005. In 2021, when he was a weekend host on the Fox News Channel, Hegseth commented on Gitmo:
“It’s a prison without a mission…It got mucked up very, very early when left wing lawyers and other protections came in…it could have been a great place to expeditiously interrogate, try and execute people we are fighting a war against…[Now] It’s of almost no value. It’s a nursing home.”
Hegseth, while lamenting the lack of summary executions there, was right about one thing: Guantánamo has no value. Except, perhaps, as a dramatic backdrop to Trump’s promised mass deportations. Hundreds of immigrants have already been rounded up, shackled and flown there, only to be then relocated elsewhere. Both Hegseth and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem have flown in for photo ops, no doubt at great taxpayer expense, which should irk Musk’s DOGE team.
CCR, meanwhile, is back in court, challenging the Trump administration’s attempt to restart migrant detentions on Guantánamo.
“For 40 years, dating back to the early 1990s, the United States government has used Guantánamo as a legal dumping ground for its political problems,” CCR Executive Director Vince Warren said on Democracy Now! “We are trying to make good on the failed promise of Barack Obama and Joe Biden to close that terrible facility.”
If Elon Musk is serious about cutting costs, he should take a hard look at Guantánamo Bay.
