GAO finds ICE wasted tens of millions on detention expansion

ICE has no strategic plan for $45 billion detention budget

Federal investigators found that US Immigration and Customs Enforcement wasted tens of millions of dollars as it rapidly expanded immigration detention capacity under President Donald Trump’s mass arrest and deportation agenda, according to a Government Accountability Office report released Thursday.

The nonpartisan GAO documented costly problems across several initiatives ICE has pursued since Trump returned to office in January 2025 and ordered the mass arrest and deportation of people his administration has deemed should be forced out of the country.

Among the misspending was nearly $3 million to erect tents at the Guantánamo Bay US naval base in Cuba that were never used, the report found. Investigators also documented $20 million spent to maintain bought warehouses that are now being sold without ever housing a single detainee.

Congress gave ICE an unprecedented $45 billion to expand detention capacity last year as part of Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, but the agency has no comprehensive strategic plan for how to spend it, the GAO warned. The ICE detainee population increased from 39,000 in January 2025 to 67,000 as of July 30.

“Without taking action to manage detention investments in accordance with program and project management practices, ICE will likely continue to make uninformed decisions and risk further inefficiency and wasted resources,” the GAO said.

The GAO, a nonpartisan investigative agency, conducted the inquiry at the request of congressional Democrats. The Department of Homeland Security, ICE’s parent agency, told investigators it would develop a plan to guide its detention expansion by August 31, 2027 — a timeline the report said may be too late to prevent further waste. ICE and DHS offered no immediate additional comment on the report.

The report detailed failures across ICE’s detention expansion efforts. After spending heavily on warehouses intended for detention, that initiative faltered. ICE has sold much of the property it bought but has also “incurred significant costs” for the four warehouses it plans to keep, including a $426 million outlay to renovate facilities in Arizona and Maryland that is on hold due to legal challenges.

ICE also launched a plan to purchase facilities owned by private contractors that were already housing detainees, saying it would give the agency more control over infrastructure and limit local governments’ ability to restrict their use. The agency spent $1.5 billion to buy two of those facilities in July and could buy more, even though ICE has “not assessed the long-term affordability of owning these facilities,” the report said.

The investigation also found fault with ICE’s handling of Alligator Alcatraz, the Everglades detention site. ICE never reached a contract with the state of Florida to operate the facility, which housed detainees for a year until it was closed in June after reports of substandard and abusive conditions.

Instead, DHS agreed to reimburse the state through a $608 million Federal Emergency Management Agency grant that authorized a charge of $249 per detainee per day — 171 percent higher than ICE’s normal rate of $92. DHS is also paying the state the higher rate for a second facility in Sanderson, Florida, that remains open.

ICE is facing high costs under a separate agreement in which the Bureau of Prisons is housing detainees at eight facilities. The agreement requires ICE to reimburse the full cost, which has ballooned because of overtime and other staffing assignments, at a rate of $182 per detainee per day, the report said.

The report also documented who has been detained under the expansion. In many cases, the government has pursued people with temporary legal status or an asylum application, or some who have a green card but have used protest speech the administration deemed dangerous, the report found. In other cases, despite saying it wanted to focus on “the worst of the worst” criminals, the Trump administration has spent resources on seeking, detaining and removing people with no criminal history who have simply violated civil immigration law yet lived, worked and paid taxes in the US for decades.

The Associated Press contributed reporting.