About a week into his second term as president, Donald Trump announced a plan that he seemed rather excited about. Reversing several years’ worth of progress, the Republican began a process that would detain tens of thousands of migrants at the U.S. military camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
The Republican assured the public that the facility would detain “the worst criminal illegal aliens,” and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth insisted soon after that Guantánamo Bay was “a perfect place” for migrants.
In hindsight, perhaps “perfect” wasn’t an ideal choice of words. The Washington Post reported:
The Trump administration has removed all the migrants who were being held at the Guantánamo Bay Naval Station in Cuba and flown them back to the United States, a Defense Department official said Wednesday. The 40 men have been transported to Louisiana, where there is a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Alexandria. It comes two weeks after the U.S. Department of Homeland Security sent another group of 48 migrants back to the same city from Guantánamo.
The article dovetailed with a related report from The Wall Street Journal that noted there are still hundreds of U.S. troops guarding an empty and unused tent city, although they’ll soon be redeployed. The Journal added, “The operation has so far cost at least $16 million, according to lawmakers who recently toured the naval base.”
There are several recent examples of the Trump administration reversing course and abandoning controversial ideas, but in nearly all of those instances, those reversals came in response to court rulings, political pressure, embarrassing news coverage or some combination thereof.
The collapse of Trump’s Guantánamo Bay policy, however, is qualitatively different: The administration is backing down, not because of a judge or public backlash, but because its own officials grudgingly acknowledged the unavoidable fact that the misguided policy was a poorly thought-out disaster.








