GAO: ICE Wasted Tens of Millions on Botched Detention Buildout Despite $45 Billion Windfall

The Government Accountability Office dropped a report Thursday, September 24, that should embarrass anyone who cares about taxpayer money, regardless of what they think about immigration policy.

GAO, the nonpartisan investigative arm of Congress, found that Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other federal agencies wasted tens of millions of dollars chasing rushed, poorly planned schemes to expand detention capacity since President Trump returned to office in January 2025. GAO warns the total will keep climbing because the mismanagement hasn't stopped.

The Specific Waste

Start with Guantanamo Bay. After the White House ordered the naval base in Cuba used for immigration detention, the Department of Defense put up tents sized to hold 5,000 people at a cost of $2.85 million, according to the report cited by PBS, NBC New York and WSB-TV. The tents never met federal detention standards. Not one detainee ever stayed in them.

The mass-detention plan for Guantanamo was later ruled "infeasible" and scrapped once officials tallied the cost of building facilities that would actually meet federal standards. Instead, the base has held an average of just 16 detainees a day this year, still costing millions.

Then there's the warehouse plan. Between January and April 2026, ICE spent $1.07 billion buying 11 large warehouses nationwide, a plan backed by then-DHS Secretary Kristi Noem to rapidly add bed space. The agency scrapped that plan too, amid public opposition, before housing a single person in them. GAO says the department failed to conduct "appropriate due diligence and planning" before writing the checks.

ICE has already spent at least $20 million maintaining those warehouses even as it sells most of them off unused, according to reporting from The Center Square. The Guardian reports ICE is keeping four of the warehouses and has committed $426 million to renovate facilities in Arizona and Maryland.

Then there's Florida's "Alligator Alcatraz," the Everglades detention site Governor Ron DeSantis has since closed. GAO found ICE paid $249 per detainee per day to hold people there, a rate 171% higher than the agency's standard $92 daily cost, according to figures reported by Ground News, for a facility investigators called deficient even while it was operating.

$45 Billion and No Plan

Congress gave ICE an unprecedented $45 billion to expand detention capacity through the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. The detainee population has grown from 39,000 in January 2025 to 67,000 by July 30, 2026.

But GAO says ICE still has no comprehensive strategic plan for spending that $45 billion wisely. "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 report states.

DHS told GAO it would have a plan in place by August 31, 2027. GAO's own assessment: that timeline may be too late to stop more money from going out the door on bad bets. ICE and DHS gave no additional comment when asked about the findings.

The Case for the Defense, and Its Limits

Supporters of the administration's enforcement push have a reasonable point buried in here: standing up detention capacity fast, during a surge in arrests, is genuinely hard, and some waste is a predictable cost of moving quickly rather than proof of bad faith. Bureaucracies that plan for years before building anything also waste money, just slower and with less to show for it.

That argument doesn't survive contact with the specifics here, though. This isn't a case of reasonable trade-offs under time pressure. It's tents that never met code before they were built, a $1.07 billion warehouse purchase abandoned for lack of basic due diligence, and a Florida facility charging nearly triple the standard rate for substandard conditions. GAO's report was requested by congressional Democrats, but the findings are numbers, not talking points, and $45 billion without a spending plan is a real problem no matter who's in charge of ICE.

The Guardian's coverage adds a claim the other outlets in this cycle didn't include: that many of the people ICE has pursued under this expansion aren't the violent criminals the administration says it's targeting, but people with temporary legal status, pending asylum claims, or green cards, including some the administration says used "protest speech" it deems dangerous. That's a characterization of enforcement priorities, not part of GAO's financial findings, and it deserves scrutiny on its own rather than folding into a waste-and-mismanagement story.

ICE has $45 billion to spend, a DHS promise of a real plan isn't due until August 2027, and GAO says the clock is already working against taxpayers.