WASHINGTON, September 25 — The Government Accountability Office has concluded that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement squandered millions of taxpayer dollars in its rush to expand detention capacity, according to a report released Thursday and reported by CBS News. The findings land at a moment when ICE is flush with cash and moving fast. Congress funneled $75 billion to the agency through President Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” including $45 billion earmarked to expand detention capacity.
The agency has nearly doubled its spending this year, disbursing $19 billion from last October through July — the most recent month for which data is available — up from $11 billion the previous full fiscal year, a CBS News analysis of federal data found.
A Single Day, and a Flood of Cash
According to federal spending records, in a single day in January, ICE spent more money than it had on any other day in either of President Trump’s terms. The agency advanced billions to Chicago Title Insurance in escrow to acquire detention facilities, a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said. Over the next two months, ICE used $1.07 billion of those funds to purchase 11 warehouses it planned to convert to detention megacenters.
Seven of those warehouses the agency now plans to sell. The rest of the money sat with the firm for months after ICE abandoned the warehouse plan.
In July and August, ICE moved $2.2 billion from Chicago Title to purchase four detention facilities from CoreCivic, a private prison company it separately pays to continue operating them. After dropping the warehouse plan, ICE spent $1.47 billion purchasing two California detention facilities from CoreCivic in July. The next month, ICE bought another two CoreCivic facilities.
The GAO review found that ICE failed to account for long-term costs in acquiring detention centers and lost $20 million in unrecoverable costs purchasing the warehouses it no longer plans to use. Even more could be lost if ICE sells the warehouses for less than what it paid for them, the report said.
Money Still Parked, Oversight Slipping
Barring any undisclosed purchases, $1.55 billion still sits with Chicago Title Insurance for acquiring detention centers as ICE continues its push to double the number of detention beds in service of the president’s mass deportation agenda. GAO concluded that “urgent planning” is necessary to reduce further waste. ICE said it would produce a strategic plan by August 31, 2027 — a date the watchdog said wasn’t soon enough.
“We just saw a real lack of planning overall,” said Heather MacLeod, director of Homeland Security and Justice at GAO. “The lack of planning has really led to stops and starts which have ultimately resulted in waste.” GAO’s report did not estimate a total amount potentially lost to waste, but MacLeod said another review of ICE spending is currently underway.
A DHS spokesperson wrote to CBS News that ICE is “working at turbo speed on cost-effective and innovative ways to deliver on the American people’s mandate for mass deportations of criminal illegal aliens,” and that the spending bill known as OBBBA has provided “historic funding” to help it carry out the mandate.
Appropriating funds outside the typical process — and without the usual guardrails that come in appropriations bills — means ICE has more flexibility in how it can use the funding, said Kevin McNellis, a policy and budget analyst who previously worked in the Congressional Budget Office and Congressional Research Service. That also leads to a breakdown in oversight, he wrote in a report he authored for Co-Equal, a nonprofit focused on congressional authority.
“When DHS only had annual funding or relied on the annual appropriations for the majority of its funding, there were long standing systems and processes in place for DHS to inform Congress of its spending plan and for Congress to then oversee those spending plans,” McNellis told CBS News.
“The situation we’ve been in since OBBBA passed is we have an unprecedented amount of money, appropriated outside those long-standing processes, trying to be spent very quickly.” The remaining warehouses ICE still hopes to convert face legal challenges, though ICE already signed contracts worth a combined $426 million to renovate two of them. No detainees are currently held in any of the warehouses. What comes next is a second GAO review of ICE spending, still underway, and a strategic plan the agency says it will deliver by August 31, 2027.
Whether Congress tightens the guardrails it bypassed when it wrote the check is the question that will determine how much more of the $75 billion follows the warehouses out the door.
