US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other federal agencies have wasted tens of millions of dollars pursuing controversial plans to rapidly increase detention capacity – and the total will likely rise due to ongoing mismanagement, congressional investigators warned on Thursday.
The US Government Accountability Office (GAO) documented costly problems in several initiatives ICE has pursued since Donald Trump returned to office in January 2025 and ordered the mass arrest and deportation of people whom his administration has deemed should be forced out of the country.
Among the misspending was nearly $3m to erect tents at the Guantánamo Bay US naval base in Cuba that were never used, $20m to maintain bought warehouses that are now being sold without having housed a single detainee and excessive rates paid to hold detainees at the deficient and now-shuttered Florida lockup title Alligator Alcatraz.
Congress gave ICE an unprecedented $45bn to expand detention capacity last year as part of the Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, but the agency has no 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 30 July.
“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 (DHS), ICE’s parent agency, told GAO it would develop a plan to guide its detention expansion by 31 August 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, by the administration’s reckoning, were in the US illegally, the report found. Often, 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.
In many 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.
After spending much on warehouses to use for detention, that initiative has faltered, the report found. It has sold a lot of the property it bought but ICE has also “incurred significant costs” for the four warehouses that it plans to keep, including a $426m million outlay to renovate facilities in Arizona and Maryland that is on hold due to legal challenges.
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 $1.5bn 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 Alligator Alcatraz in the Everglades, 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 special $608m Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) 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.
The Associated Press contributed reporting
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