A $20 Million Lesson in How Not to Build a Detention System

The Government Accountability Office dropped a number on Washington Thursday that ought to embarrass anyone who cares about running government like a business: more than $20 million wasted as the Department of Homeland Security scrambled to expand immigration detention without a plan to spend the money it had just been handed.

Congressional Republicans approved roughly $175 billion for immigration enforcement last year, and ICE set a goal of detaining up to 100,000 immigrants as part of the administration's push to deport a million people a year. That is an aggressive target, and I have no quarrel with the ambition behind it. But GAO found that DHS started spending before it had a comprehensive strategic plan, and the bill for that improvisation is now coming due.

Start with Guantanamo Bay, a facility so remote that fresh water has to be shipped in. The Department of Defense spent $2.85 million assembling tents that were never used, and ICE obligated $43 million from the start of fiscal year 2025 through June 30, 2026, to hold an average daily population of 16 noncitizens. Sixteen people. At Camp East Montana, a soft-sided facility on a military base in El Paso, ICE had already wasted more than $11 million as of August 2026, including paying for meals before detainees arrived. The agency awarded a new contract in March, and as of August 2026 still had not built the cost-saving fixes into that contract, continuing to pay for services it did not need.

Then there is the warehouse deal, 11 sites purchased for $1.07 billion under then-Secretary Kristi Noem, a purchase examined in this week's GAO report. After she stepped down following the shooting deaths of two U.S. citizens by immigration officials in Minneapolis, her successor, former Oklahoma Sen. Markwayne Mullin, paused the effort. DHS now plans to unload seven of those warehouses, but the reversal has left $7.7 million in sunk costs on zoning assessments and title insurance, and ICE was still paying roughly $12.8 million as of last month for utilities and security at sites it intends to offload. Separately, ICE is moving to purchase $1.5 billion in existing detention facilities, per this week's GAO report, without having assessed what it will cost to actually run them long-term. And in Florida, DHS used FEMA money to send the state $608.4 million for the now-shuttered "Alligator Alcatraz" facility, without a formal reimbursement agreement in place, according to the GAO report released this week.

GAO's most pointed finding is forward-looking: ICE has not projected costs beyond the first three years of operation, even though the funding from the One Big Beautiful Act and Secure America Act runs out after fiscal 2029. The agency agreed to build a strategic plan, but it will not be finished until Aug. 31, 2027. GAO's own language captured the stakes: "Given ICE's unprecedented multi-year detention funding and the potential for continued waste of taxpayer dollars, more timely completion may be warranted."

Louisiana is worth a look here, because it took a different path. The state now hosts nine dedicated ICE detention facilities, second only to Texas nationally, with combined capacity around 6,000 beds, according to reporting on the buildout. Facilities like Winn Correctional Center, Richwood, Pine Prairie and the Central Louisiana ICE Processing Center in Jena were converted from existing correctional infrastructure rather than built from scratch. Angola added Camp 57 last year, another repurposed complex rather than a newly poured foundation. Whatever one thinks of the politics of mass detention, that is the fiscally sound version of expansion: use capacity that already exists instead of assembling tents in the Caribbean or buying warehouses you will turn around and offload at a loss.

This is where the America First case for strong border enforcement runs headlong into the case against waste, and they are not actually in tension. Money spent on unused tents and utility bills for warehouses headed to market is money that did not go toward beds, agents or removals. Louisiana added 2022.0 thousand nonfarm payroll jobs in August 2026, up from 2016.5 thousand in July, and the state's unemployment rate fell to 4.2 percent in August from 4.4 percent the month before. Rural parishes hosting these facilities feel every dollar of that payroll, which is exactly why the difference between a converted prison and a $2.85 million pile of unused canvas matters to more than a budget analyst in Washington.

DHS has until Aug. 31, 2027, to produce the plan GAO says should have existed before the spending started. The funding clock runs out two years after that.