Escobar Rips Trump’s Migrant Detention Flop After Visiting Guantanamo

Bipartisan visit reveals an expensive, impractical migrant plan with no oversight.

WASHINGTON — Rep. Veronica Escobar, D-Texas, sharply criticized the Trump administration’s use of Guantanamo Bay to detain migrants, calling it a costly and flawed policy after touring the facility last weekend as part of a bipartisan congressional delegation.

“It is a monumentally expensive effort,” Escobar said in an interview Friday. “It is so expensive that it flies in the face of everything Trump and Musk claim they’re trying to do, which is save taxpayer money.”

The delegation, led by Rep. Trent Kelly, R-Miss., included Escobar and Rep. Jimmy Panetta, D-Calif., as the only Democrats. The visit on March 10 followed an earlier codel on March 8, organized by House Armed Services Committee Chairman Mike Rogers, R-Ala., who initiated it to assess the base firsthand amid Trump’s push to detain migrants there.

That earlier trip, which included Reps. Carlos Giménez, R-Fla., and Clay Higgins, R-La., came as the administration moved to expand the naval base’s capacity to hold up to 30,000 migrants for deportation processing, per a January 29 executive order. However, Escobar described the operation she saw as underutilized, with fewer migrants than staff present.

“There are big problems with housing people at Gitmo,” she said. “First off, all of the facilities are really old. There’s simply not enough infrastructure to do what Trump claims, which is house tens of thousands of people, and will cost hundreds of millions of dollars to build the infrastructure at the facility.”

---

Migrant Insider is sponsored by

immigration.net

---

Escobar highlighted logistical and safety concerns, noting the base’s vulnerability to hurricanes. “There are huge risks with the Trump plan, which is basically to build a tent city,” she said. “The facility is in the direct pathway of hurricanes. So no one is safe if they grow the detainee population to the level they’re suggesting. Not migrants. Not ICE personnel. Not the military who are already there.”

The Department of Defense has spent $16 million on the migrant detention effort since early February, according to Escobar’s office, though the Department of Homeland Security declined to provide its cost figures when asked by her team. On the base, Escobar pressed for a per-bed cost but was told by DHS officials that the information was unavailable.

“This could not be a more expensive way to do this,” she said. “This is an irresponsible, expensive, terrible way to deport people.”