U.S. Suspends Costly Deportation Flights Using Military Aircraft | Hacker News Reader

U.S. Suspends Costly Deportation Flights Using Military Aircraft

wsj.com

33 pointsimpish920828 comments

Much like everything else in this administration, smarter people have already been screaming from the rooftops about how expensive and impractical it is[1] but everyone has to learn the hard way.

[1] https://immigrationimpact.com/2025/02/07/sending-migrants-gu...

> Three deportation flights to India cost $3 million each. Some flights carried a dozen people to Guantanamo at a cost of at least $20,000 for a migrant, the Journal’s analysis showed.

> A standard U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement flight costs $8,500 per flight hour, according to a government webpage. Former ICE officials told the Journal the figure is closer to $17,000 per flight hour for international trips.

> It costs $28,500 per hour to fly a C-17, which is designed to carry heavy cargo and troops, according to U.S. Transportation Command, which provided the aircraft.

welcome to the economics of efficiency, curtesy of the smartest men on the planet.

C17 to India would also require multiple refuelling.

Gift link: https://www.wsj.com/politics/national-security/trump-deporta...

Something I've noticed is that the facade of "efficiency" isn't even being proferred anymore. Only a month and a half in and the mask has dropped completely.

Indeed. It was never about efficiency.

What astonishes me is that these obvious lies often trick otherwise smart people. Specifically, I recently watched a roundtable that included John Cochrane and he was super excited about the "brilliant little doge team" and their cost cutting (this was just after they nuked USAID). Like, is it possible that's hes actually stupid? Or maybe media illiterate. Or maybe he's not paying attention to the way the world is going, and still takes these people at face value. All of these are bad looks for someone who's supposed to be a top economist.

They’re not otherwise smart people. They never were. They were just saying things that you wanted to hear before the mask fell off.

When people finally tell you who they are, listen.

They've stopped using military transport /because/ they say it's inefficient.

Nobody was surprised by the cost. Military flights have been used for deportations before and it is well known that they are wildly more expensive than other options. The clowns in charge keep proving that the cost cutting is an extremely weak pretense, but a disturbing number of people still believe them.

I don't see them calling their own decision inefficient in any reporting or statements.

I really wish Biden had just ended Guantanamo. I fully believe that the people remaining there are the worst of the worst, and would do tremendous harm if released, or even given access to the American judicial system. But Guantanamo is a massive stain on America's reputation, a judicial no-man's-land every bit as bad as the gulags of the Soviet Union.

I cannot believe that we are sending people there. They're not even accused of terrorism; they were not captured as illegal combatants.

This is shameful. We should be ashamed of ourselves. I know that the world is ashamed of us.

Worst of the worst is certainly what the media parroted. However, from 2011

A newly found 2003 memo by former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld appears to directly contradict claims that Guantanamo held only the “worst of the worst” suspected terrorists.

“We need to stop populating Guantanamo Bay (GTMO) with low-level enemy combatants,” Rumsfeld says in the memo, addressed to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

https://web.archive.org/web/20210827120559/http://voices.was...

That was almost certainly true in 2003. Some prisoners have been moved out since then.

I don't actually know whether what remains truly is the "worst of the worst". I'm willing to accept it for the sake of argument: even if it's true, we look like monsters for not affording them a trial after a quarter-century.

Guantanamo as a prison camp is, IMO, shameful.

The naval base itself is rarely discussed but a critical port for deep water US Naval operations in the Caribbean.

Are they being held there indefinitely? I was under the impression it was a temporary relocation until they could be forwarded to country of origin? But I frankly can't remember if I've seen any argument from the govt about why they're sending them to gitmo

How many more years do they need to be there to be indefinite?

2001 to 2025 is 24 years. These guys are portrayed as being the worst terrorist imaginable but a lot of them are just guys whose neighbor wanted a goat for reporting a terrorist (accurate or not).

Presumably, the government wants to get them repatriated as soon as possible. But they will be there until that happens, which could be forever.

The reason they're sending them to Guantanamo is so that they have no access to the US courts. They cannot challenge their arrest. For all we know, some of these could be US citizens.

They can, and have, challenged their detention in US courts. There is a ton of litigation on this. It's just that... they are still there, somehow :(

The existence of Guantanamo is just about illegal. Cuba doesn't want it there and won't cash our checks to pay for it. It's the perfect place to send people for an administration that looks to skate around and break the law as much as possible.

Last I read (though it's been awhile), Guantanamo was still housing an aging group of indefinite detainees from the war on terror to the tune of much more than a million per head per year (healthcare costs being the biggest expense).

Justice William Brennan once said "The Bill of Rights was designed to protect the rights of the minority, the rights of the despised, the rights of the powerless, against the majority".

Attorney Harvey Silverglate also stated, "The rights of the accused are the rights of all of us. If the government can ignore the Constitution and the Bill of Rights for people it doesn't like, it can do so for anyone".

Obama should have shut it, Biden should have shut it. Now here we are. Turn it into a wildlife preserve if you don't want to hand it over to the Cubans.

Obama tried and was stopped by Congress, Biden made token gestures towards closing it to appease his base but I don't think he was actually opposed to it.

Reminds me of an anecdote from communist era Poland.

Factory workers were encouraged to suggest means of improving yield and reducing waste. In a pencil factory, a worker observed that no one sharpens a pencil all the way to the very end - there is a minimum length that is comfortable to hold. Therefore the last bit of the lead is never used, and thus wasted. Duly, the factory stopped filling the last 1/4 of the wooden shell with pencil lead and the worker was given a prize.

Next year, another factory worker suggested that, since the final 1/4 of the pencil is empty, they might as well get rid of it altogether. Factory accepted the idea and the worker got a prize.

First, optimize the country by deporting dangerous immigrants. Then, optimize the deportations by cancelling them due to price.

They didn't say they're stopping deportations. They said they're not going to use military transportation.

The whole idea of using military aircraft for deportations to foreign nations already served by commercial airlines was dumb performative bullshit to begin with, but who’s going to fly them to Guantanamo? At the very least that policy might now be prevented by a technicality (and I don’t think the Cuban government is going to let the US transport them through Antonio Maceo International).

the whole idea of immigrant deportations is expensive, regardless the route.

Well, except they're still flying them home, just using cheaper methods.

So the punchline to your joke would be the guy says they don't even have to drill out that last fourth of the pencil and they can save manufacturing time

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