Fox News’ stars are wildly credulous about President Donald Trump’s plan to house up to 30,000 criminal migrants at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.

Trump offered few specifics in launching the idea at a White House event. 

“We have 30,000 beds in Guantánamo to detain the worst criminal illegal aliens threatening the American people,” he said. “Some of them are so bad we don’t even trust the countries to hold them, because we don’t want them coming back. So we’re going to send them out to Guantanamo.” 

The White House later released a three-sentence presidential memo directing the secretaries of Defense and Homeland Security “to expand the Migrant Operations Center at Naval Station Guantanamo Bay to full capacity to provide additional detention space for high-priority criminal aliens unlawfully present in the United States.”

But that was enough for Trump’s Fox propagandists to cheer. 

• Will Cain praised the “creative, innovative” plan and touted how “Donald Trump is thinking of new solutions.” 

• Jesse Watters touted the Gitmo endeavor as a place to put the “baddest hombres.” 

• And Laura Ingraham appeared to suggest that Trump might have gotten the idea from Fox’s programming in the first place (which is always a possibility). 

Their cheers come even as Trump and his defense secretary, former Fox host Pete Hegseth, appear to be publicly discussing wildly different plans.

Trump appears to be envisioning a permanent prison facility for tens of thousands of people who “are so dangerous, we can’t deport them, they'll come back, we have to imprison them,” as Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) put in on Thursday.

But Hegseth, who was previously stationed at Guantanamo, does not appear to be on the same page — and barely on the same book. He described the plan as one intended “to humanely move illegals out of our country, where they do not belong, back to the countries where they came from, in proper process” in a Wednesday Fox interview. 

When Cain, his former Fox & Friends Weekend co-host, asked him to describe “the kind of illegal immigrant that will be sent to Guantanamo,” the defense secretary replied: “It’s folks who maybe are in transit to their home country or a safe third harbor country, and it’s taking a little time to move with that processing of the paperwork. Better they be held at a safe location, like Guantanamo Bay, which is meant and built for migrants, meant and built to sustain that, away from the American people, as they are processed properly to where they came from.”

Either way, housing thousands of prisoners at Guantanamo presents significant cost, logistics, and legal challenges.

The Migrant Operations Center at Guantanamo Bay is not a turn-key facility with 30,000 beds, as Trump suggested. The center, used to house migrants intercepted trying to reach the U.S. by boat, held that many people (in often-horrifying conditions) on a temporary basis during the Cuban and Haitian refugee crises of the 1990s. But currently, the center is composed of “just a handful of buildings” and holds a number “in the double digits,” The Associated Press reported. (All of this is separate from the prison and courts established at the base for foreigners detained through the “war on terror,” a group which now numbers 15.)

“The facility is decrepit. It's been falling apart. It's in disrepair,” Vince Warren, the executive director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, told NPR. “And, as a practical matter, the conditions that would be created if people went there would be so substandard that it would give people opportunities to file lawsuits around the conditions of their confinement while they're being deported.”

So the administration will effectively be starting from scratch and building a facility to house — depending on who you believe — either hardened violent criminals on a permanent basis or deportees on a temporary one. As NPR notes, this “would require construction; food and lodging for the people held there; guards or staff to oversee the facility; and transportation to get migrants there.”

Those costs will prove much more exorbitant given Guantanamo’s remote location. 

“Guantanamo is just plain expensive,” New York Times reporter Carol Rosenberg explained in 2019 after analyzing the costs of maintaining the prison and court system. “It's down here in Cuba. Everything comes in by airplane or barge. Everything has a markup. Construction has a markup. This is an extremely isolated, expensive place to run this kind of operation.”

At the time, the annual bill for Guantanamo’s detention facility was running at $13 million per prisoner.

Meanwhile, sending migrants to Guantanamo will surely bring legal challenges. 

“While Guantanamo Bay was used to house migrants interdicted in the ocean in the 1990s, it has never been used to house people arrested inside the United States,” the American Immigration Council’s Aaron Reichlin-Melnick explained. “Such use raises a whole host of constitutional and legal questions that [will] undoubtedly lead to major lawsuits.”

At Fox, the job isn’t to try to tease out such potential implications, but to blindly celebrate whatever the administration does, no matter how incoherent it may be.