The Staggering Cost Of Trump Deportation Flights
The Trump administration is rounding up and expelling undocumented migrants and using Department of Defense aircraft to fly them out of the United States…at a staggering cost.
Trump Deportation Flights Come At A High Price
From the very start: this is not a pro-Trump or anti-Trump post. I’m not interested here in discussing the merits of the policy to round up illegal aliens with criminal records and deport them. Here, the issue is exclusively the manner and cost of the reparation flights out of the USA.
Declaring his immigration crackdown a national emergency, an official told CNN the military has not begun to calculate the costs of the flight due to the emergency declaration the White House issued on Monday. Instead, officials are moving “as quickly as possible with little regard to cost.”
This comes at a great cost.
A 2023 DOD comptroller report lists the average hourly cost of operating a C-17 as $21,000 and the average hourly cost of operating a C-130E between $68,000 and $71,000.
Using that math, the C-17 flights that flew from El Paso, Texas to Guatemala City, Guatemala on Thursday cost $252,000. There were 80 migrants onboard, meaning $3,150 per criminal alien.
A 12-hour round-trip flight on a C-130E could cost as much as $852,000!
Why military aircraft? Why not run them through a far less costly Department of Homeland Security charter? Why not hire Spirit Airlines to do it? That’d be one way to keep the bankrupt ultra-low-cost carrier busy…you can bet it would earn more than it does through its scheduled operations.
I find it staggering how the federal government and the Department of Defense in particular burns through cash. Surely there must be a cheaper way to get these people out of the United States?
image: The White House