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Trump's first deportation flights with average of just 80 migrants cost up to $852,000 per trip
As a part of his ongoing effort to carry out mass deportations throughout the country, President Donald Trump employed the use of Department of Defense resources to return many migrants to their home countries.
Publicly available data suggests that using U.S. military planes to fly migrants out of the country may be significantly more expensive than flights chartered by the Department of Homeland Security.
A U.S. defense official told CNN that the military has not begun to calculate the costs of the flight, which lasted 12 hours, since a national emergency was declared by Trump on Monday, and officials are moving as quickly as possible with little regard to cost, the official said.
The DOD reported on Wednesday that they would be providing two C-17s and two C-130E planes to help with what are known as "migrant repatriation flights."
According to the DOD comptroller, as of fall 2022, the average hourly cost of operating a C-17 was about $21,000 and the average hourly cost of operating a C-130E was between $68,000 and $71,000. Based on these figures, it can be estimated that the C-17 flight on Thursday that carried 80 migrants from El Paso, Texas, to Guatemala City would have cost roughly $252,000. For the same 12-hour flight using the C-130E, it would cost between $816,000 and $852,000.
In comparison, a flight directly chartered by DHS’ Immigration and Customs Enforcement is $8,577 per hour, according to estimates posted by the agency.
Surely this is exactly the kind of waste, fraud, and abuse that Elon has in mind to curtail.
I mean... right...?
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