In August, a team of Senate staff members inspected the Trump administration’s migrant detention operations at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. They found 445 government employers assigned to the site, mostly U.S. military members on temporary deployment, and zero migrants.
The findings were released Friday, in the latest report to criticize the cost of the operation. Early in his second administration, President Trump ordered the Homeland Security and Defense Departments to get ready to hold tens of thousands of migrants designated for deportation at Guantánamo. About 850 migrants have been held there since February 2025.
“This comes at a significant cost to taxpayers and undermines military readiness,” according to the report, released by Senator Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, the senior Democrat on the Judiciary Committee.
The study also found the Guantánamo operation has cost more than $100 million, which means the government has spent $118,000 to house each detainee there.
Government officials described the Guantánamo operation as a way station for detainees being deported. The report said the average length of stay for the 850 men was 20 to 30 days. Some were held for months.
Officials with Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Homeland Security Department did not provide comparable costs in the U.S.-based installations that have held the hundreds of thousands of foreign men, women and children since Mr. Trump took office.
Criticisms in the report included a heavy reliance on military personnel for an operation that was ostensibly run by ICE, and questions about whether military or homeland security detention regulations were followed at the prison.
At one ICE facility on the base, a former prison for Al Qaeda and Taliban suspects, detainees did not have a designated place to talk by phone with their lawyers confidentially.
Mr. Durbin released the report ahead of a hearing in federal court in Washington on a challenge by the American Civil Liberties Union to the lawfulness of the offshore operation.
In a statement, he called the migrant operation at Guantánamo “simply unlawful, and worse yet, inhumane” and Trump administration immigration policies “cruel, immoral, and an abuse of taxpayer funding.”
Only Democratic staff members took part in compiling the report. It follows a critical study by the Government Accountability Office of wasteful overall spending practices by the Trump administration’s detention and deportation operations. It included the $2.85 million it spent on tent housing for 5,000 detainees that was dismantled and never occupied. The tents, it turned out, did not meet federal detention standards.
As of Friday, ICE was holding three migrants there, according to two people with knowledge of the operation who spoke on the condition of anonymity. The migrants’ nationalities were not known.
All three were being held in a prison that was built to house about 180 Al Qaeda suspects in 2006. It was refitted for ICE, with bunk beds inside the cells to hold up to 350 migrants.
While the Pentagon position is that the detainees at the prison are in ICE custody, the report said that 23 U.S. military troops are assigned to guard migrants there each shift, accompanied by an ICE officer and two homeland security contractors.
The Senate staff members also discovered that the predominantly U.S. military staff was guided by Army detention policies and that the others reported being bound by ICE rules. But none could show the visitors joint standard operation procedures to resolve any differences their different rules might create, the report said.
The Homeland Security Department already had a separate 100-bed facility for holding migrants at Guantánamo who had been found at sea and sought asylum. But it was empty this week. The Senate staff found that it could hold only 50 men because of longstanding maintenance or structural problems.
The 850 men who were brought from the United States to ICE holding sites at Guantánamo since February 2025 were from 36 nations, according to the study. They included deportees to nearby Cuba, Haiti and Jamaica and others from distant countries that included Eritrea, India and Micronesia.
Representatives for the Homeland Security Department and ICE did not respond to questions about whether the government was planning to expand the detention capacity, consolidate the two facilities or end operations.
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