Photo: U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Public domain), via Wikimedia Commons (source)
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement bought 11 warehouses for detention for roughly $1.07 billion, by the agency's reported figures, and now intends to sell seven of them, the Government Accountability Office said in a report released Thursday, Sept. 24.
ICE told GAO in June that it was working to sell the seven buildings. The agency reported spending more than $20 million on costs it cannot recover for those properties, including zoning assessments and security, according to the report.
The warehouse purchases are one of six detention expansion initiatives ICE has launched since January 2025, when a presidential order told DHS to detain people arrested for immigration violations to the extent the law allows and to put all available resources toward detention. GAO said ICE invested billions of dollars in those initiatives without doing the necessary analysis and planning, and that the approach had produced millions of dollars in waste as of July 2026.
Axios reported that the agency has been given upward of $75 billion for expansion during Trump's second term, and that unused meals and unusable tents also contributed to the waste GAO identified.
No plan for bed space
GAO found that ICE has not set consistent goals for how much detention space it needs or what kind. It also has not weighed the risks and benefits of relying on facilities with high operating costs rather than cheaper options in its traditional detention network, the report said.
GAO defines waste as spending government resources carelessly or extravagantly. It said a comprehensive plan laying out goals, activities and resource needs could help ICE manage its "multibillion-dollar detention expansion efforts" and reduce the waste that comes from scaling back inefficient projects.
For the review, GAO examined agency documents, analyzed operating cost data, and interviewed headquarters staff and officials at eight Texas and Florida facilities, sites chosen in part because they hosted new expansion initiatives.
What's next
GAO made one recommendation: that the ICE director develop a comprehensive strategic plan for detention expansion. DHS agreed and said ICE will write a plan that includes the elements GAO identified. But ICE does not expect to finish it until Aug. 31, 2027. GAO said that given ICE's "unprecedented multi-year detention funding" and the risk of continued waste, "more timely completion may be warranted."
Sources
- U.S. Government Accountability Office: Immigration Detention: Urgent Planning Needed to Avoid Further Waste of Taxpayer Dollars (GAO-26-108663) (2026-09-24)
- Axios: ICE wasted millions in rush to expand detention, government watchdog finds (2026-09-25)
Motion Media News corrects errors promptly. To report one, email hello@motionnews.studio.
Added to the Motion Media archive on Sep. 28, 2026.
.jpg){kind=link}