U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other agencies have wasted tens of millions of dollars pursuing ill-conceived plans to rapidly increase detention capacity, and the total will likely rise due to ongoing mismanagement, congressional investigators warned Thursday.
The U.S. Government Accountability Office documented costly problems in several initiatives ICE has pursued since President Donald Trump returned to office in January 2025 and ordered
the mass arrest and deportation of people who are in the country illegally.
Among the misspending was nearly $3 million to erect tents at Guantanamo Bay that were never used, $20 million to maintain purchased warehouses that are now being sold without having housed a single detainee, and excessive rates paid to hold detainees at a deficient and now-shuttered Florida lockup.
Congress gave ICE an unprecedented $45 billion to expand detention capacity last year as part of the Trump-backed One Big Beautiful Bill, but the agency still lacks a comprehensive strategic plan for how to spend it wisely, the report warned. The detainee population has 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,” warned the GAO, a nonpartisan agency that investigated at the request of congressional Democrats.
The Department of Homeland Security, ICE's parent agency, told GAO it would develop a plan to guide its detention expansion by Aug. 31, 2027, but that may be too late to prevent more waste, the report said.
ICE and DHS offered no immediate additional comment on the report.
Shortly after Trump returned to the White House, the government began blowing money by hastily pursuing plans to detain more people who were in the U.S. illegally, the report found.
After the White House directed officials to use the military base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, for immigration detention in January 2025, the Department of Defense assembled enough tents to hold 5,000 people there at a cost of $2.85 million, the report said. But DHS found that the tents didn't meet detention standards, and they were removed before they housed a single detainee.
The plan for mass detention at Guantánamo Bay was later found to be “infeasible” and scrapped because of the costs of building facilities that could meet federal standards. Instead, the agency housed an average of 16 detainees daily there this year, at a cost of millions of dollars, the report found.
Earlier this year, ICE purchased 11 large warehouses across the country for $1.07 billion as part of a plan backed by former DHS Secretary Kristi Noem to increase detention capacity. But that idea was scrapped amid public opposition before any detainees were housed in them because the department didn't conduct “appropriate due diligence and planning," according to the GAO report. DHS is now planning to sell seven of the facilities.
ICE has spent $20 million on costs and services related to those seven warehouses that it will not recover, including zoning assessments, title insurance, utilities and security, and will need to sell them for the total purchase price of $707 million to avoid more waste, the report said.
ICE has also “incurred significant costs” for the four warehouses that it plans to keep, including a $426 million outlay to renovate facilities in Arizona and Maryland that is on hold due to legal challenges.
After the warehouse initiative faltered, ICE launched a plan to purchase facilities owned by private contractors that were already housing detainees, saying it would give more control over infrastructure and limit local governments' ability to restrict their use.
The agency spent $1.5 billion to buy two of them in July and could buy more even though ICE has “not assessed the long-term affordability of owning these facilities," the report said.
The report found fault with other initiatives. ICE never reached a contract with the state of Florida to operate the facility nicknamed “Alligator Alcatraz,” which housed detainees for a year until it was closed in June following reports of substandard and abusive conditions.
Instead, DHS agreed to reimburse the state through a special $608 million Federal Emergency Management Agency grant that authorizes a charge of $249 per detainee per day — 171% higher than ICE's normal rate of $92, the report found. DHS is also paying the state the higher rate for a second facility that's still open in Sanderson, Florida.
ICE is also facing high costs under an 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, and pay a rate of $182 per detainee per day, the report said.
