MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
The Trump administration says it is moving ahead with a plan announced yesterday to use the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to house up to 30,000 migrants deported from the United States. Here is Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth speaking today.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
PETE HEGSETH: We're leaning forward on supporting the president's directive to make sure that we have a location for violent criminal illegals as they are deported out of the country, and we're working that in real time.
KELLY: How realistic is that proposal? Well, my cohost today is Sacha Pfeiffer. Hi, Sacha.
SACHA PFEIFFER, HOST:
Hi, Mary Louise...
KELLY: You've been...
PFEIFFER: ...Sitting next to me here.
KELLY: Yeah. Good to have you in the studio with me. You've been covering this question about how to use Guantanamo. You've been trying to answer that very question. What have you learned?
PFEIFFER: So I have learned that although the Trump administration confidently says it will make this happen - and we've heard that not just from Trump himself and from Defense Secretary Hegseth, but from Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and border czar Tom Homan - despite their confidence, they're going to face a lot of hurdles in carrying out this plan. The first is funding.
KELLY: OK, so let's follow on that one. I'm imagining that transporting 30,000 people to a Caribbean island and then housing them and feeding them and supervising them for we don't know how long, that that would not be cheap.
PFEIFFER: Exactly. And the administration has not said how much it would cost, but it says it expects Congress to allocate the money. It is not clear that Congress would do that. For comparison's sake, the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo, which is where alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed has held, that has cost U.S. taxpayers more than $6 billion since it opened in 2002, and it is still open. At its height, it held just under 800 people. Now imagine the cost of holding 30,000 people at a migrant detention facility that still needs to be set up.
KELLY: Which prompts the question, might members of Congress, including Republicans who support Donald Trump, might they bulk at that kind of cost?
PFEIFFER: Yes, and that's what one of the people I interviewed thinks. I called the editor of the legal website Lawfare, Ben Wittes, and he said Congress might hesitate. Here he is with the hypothetical.
BEN WITTES: You can create it. You can bring people there. But then, 20-plus years later, you're stuck with it, and you're trying to get rid of them one by one. And so I think there will be a lot of members of Congress who are not so eager to fund it.
KELLY: So that's Ben Wittes telling you, Sacha, about some of the cost obstacles. What about things not related to money? I'm thinking legal hurdles. Can this be done legally? Can the Trump administration legally deport migrants to Guantanamo?
PFEIFFER: It appears yes, but if migrants deported from the U.S. are sent to Guantanamo, they are still entitled to certain legal rights under U.S. law because they were in the U.S. And those rights do not disappear just because they're suddenly in Cuba. That means there should be no legal benefit to deporting them there.
KELLY: So why do this? What's the point of sending them to Guantanamo if it, A, could be really expensive, and, B, there no legal advantages?
PFEIFFER: Ben Wittes of Lawfare believes that there's an intentional symbolism to the Trump administration wanting to use Guantanamo.
WITTES: The name Guantanamo Bay to America signals terrorist detention. So it elevates the status of what are really routine immigration enforcement actions into something like holding major terrorist figures that signals, I'm going to bring back the big bad Guantanamo Bay for this.
PFEIFFER: And Mary Louise, Wittes says the administration could hold migrants somewhere else, like somewhere in the middle of our country, but that wouldn't attract as much attention, and it wouldn't send as much of a macho message.
KELLY: So bottom line, what does this add up to? How likely is it that the Trump administration will ultimately end up sending 30,000 people to Guantanamo Bay?
PFEIFFER: A Georgetown University law professor I interviewed is skeptical that would actually happen, but he does think that some migrants could be sent there as a spectacle of sorts, a kind of a flex of U.S. muscle. This is Georgetown Professor Steve Vladeck.
STEVE VLADECK: The logistical and just practical hurdles that the government would face if they tried to do this on anything other than a purely superficial, sensational scale, I think, are really ultimately going to be daunting.
PFEIFFER: But as we heard the defense secretary say a few minutes ago, the Trump administration says all systems are go.
KELLY: Sacha, thank you for your reporting on this and for hosting with me today.
PFEIFFER: Thank you. Good to be with you.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR鈥檚 programming is the audio record.
