Five senators who visited the U.S. base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, criticized the migrant mission there over the weekend as a waste of resources, after the Pentagon estimated that the operation had cost $40 million in its first month.

The Senate delegation on Friday toured Immigration and Customs Enforcement facilities where about 85 migrants were being held, including in a prison that for years housed wartime detainees linked to Al Qaeda.

President Donald J. Trump was sworn into office a mere 10 weeks ago and his efforts to seal up the U.S. border have succeeded under nearly any criteria imaginable.

Cost Savings:

ABC News reported over the weekend that the mission to secure the Southwest border cost taxpayers $330 million through mid-March, including more than $40 million for Guantanamo Bay alone.

The Trump administration’s move to detain people for Immigration and Customs Enforcement at the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, has cost taxpayers $40 million in its first month, according to U.S. Sen. Alex Padilla, D-Calif., who called the price tag “exorbitant.”

The Trump administration has flown all of the migrants it had held in Guantánamo Bay out of the facility there, NBC News has learned from three sources familiar with the operation and flight data.

In response to a lawsuit, the Trump administration said that there were 178 immigrants, all from Venezuela, housed at Guantánamo Bay as of early Thursday. 

When I heard the news that President Donald Trump wants to detain up to 30,000 migrants at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba, my stomach sank. I am an immigration attorney at the International Refugee Assistance Project (IRAP), and last year my colleagues and I published a report trying to uncover and end the inhumane detention of refugees at the naval base. The details of our investigation show why the Migrant Operations Center at Guantánamo should be closed, not expanded, and why the Trump administration's plan for mass detentions would be disastrous.

Ten Tren de Aragua gangbangers were among the first migrant criminals loaded onto a plane and shipped off to Guantanamo Bay this week.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters Wednesday that the TdA creeps were hauled off on a flight out of El Paso, Texas, to Cuba Tuesday afternoon.

“Overall, our heroic ICE agents continue to prioritize the removal of violent criminal illegal aliens in communities across the country,” said Leavitt.

The first deportation flights carrying migrants from the United States to Guantanamo Baywere "underway" on Tuesday, the White House confirmed, as President Donald Trump's new administration looks to crack down on illegal immigration.

The first flight was reportedly carrying nearly a dozen migrants, a security official told the Reuters news agency, the first of over 5,000 people held by US authorities in Texas and California which the Pentagon says it intends to deport.