GAO: ICE Has No Strategic Plan for $45B Detention Expansion, Wasted $20M+ on Warehouses It Now Plans to Sell

A Government Accountability Office report (GAO-26-108663, released September 24, 2026) found ICE has pursued its detention expansion — funded by $45 billion appropriated through the One Big Beautiful Bill, on top of more than $75 billion received for detention operations since January 2025 — without a comprehensive strategic plan, and documented specific waste. ICE spent more than $20 million in nonrecoverable costs (zoning assessments, security buildout) on 7 of 11 warehouses it purchased for roughly $1.07 billion and now intends to sell, and purchased more than $2.5 billion in detention facilities and warehouses without calculating maintenance costs beyond the first three years. The report separately documents rate distortions: ICE spent approximately $43 million housing migrants at Guantanamo Bay during a period when the average daily population there was just 16 detainees, and Florida facilities were reimbursed through a $608 million FEMA grant at $249 per detainee per day — 171% above ICE’s standard $92/day rate, and well above the $182/day Bureau of Prisons rate. The detained population grew 71% between January 2025 and July 2026, from about 39,300 to nearly 67,200. DHS agreed to develop a spending plan by August 2027.

This is GAO’s second detention-spending rebuke of the year documenting the same underlying failure mode: the June report on Camp East Montana found the megajail program “wasted millions” on a single stalled site (2026-06-19–ice-megajail-program-retreats-gao-finds-camp-east-montana-wasted-millions); this report generalizes that finding across the full $45 billion buildout, three months after the Reengineering Initiative’s original warehouse-conversion strategy stalled program-wide (2026-08-19–ice-detention-reengineering-initiative-stalls-program-wide-11-purchased-sites) and the same week DHS committed a further $7.3 billion to a five-state IDIQ construction program (2026-09-21–dhs-awards-7-3b-idiq-detention-contracts-five-states). GAO is documenting the waste from the first capital wave while the second is already being obligated, with the strategic plan it recommends not due until 2027.