WASHINGTON (Dispatches) - U.S. 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 continuing mismanagement, congressional investigators warned on Thursday.
The U.S. government accountability office (GAO) 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 his administration has deemed should be forced out of the country, Bloomberg reported
Among the misspending was nearly $3mln to erect tents at the Guantánamo Bay U.S. naval base in Cuba that were never used; $20mn 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 known as “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 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 (DHS), ICE’s parent agency, told the GAO it would develop a plan to guide its detention expansion by August 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, by the administration’s reckoning, were in the U.S. 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 deems 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 violated civil immigration law yet lived, worked and paid taxes in the U.S. 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 $426mln 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.
The family of a Venezuelan man shot by U.S. immigration agents while delivering a DoorDash order told AFP on Wednesday that he required urgent medical attention for a bullet lodged near his spine.
Wilber Rafael Garces Perez told reporters he was working on Sunday in Austin, Texas, when Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents rammed his vehicle and shot him in the upper back.
The shooting marked the latest instance of violence by ICE agents tasked with enforcing President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown.
The 28-year-old Venezuelan remains in federal ICE custody.
His mother, Flor Perez, said the bullet had caused paralysis on the left side of his body and that she feared it might spread to an organ.