PHOENIX (AZFamily/AP) — U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has wasted tens of millions of dollars pursuing ill-conceived plans to rapidly increase detention capacity, and the total will likely rise due to ongoing mismanagement, congressional investigators warned Thursday.
The U.S. Government Accountability Office 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 who are in the country illegally.
Congress gave ICE an unprecedented $45 billion to expand detention capacity last year as part of the Trump-backed One Big Beautiful Bill, but the agency still lacks a 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.
“These huge mega bills, like the One Big Beautiful Bill act, and through what’s called reconciliation, which means that there’s a lot less oversight by Congress over how that money actually gets spent. And so it’s something where you’re inviting waste when you have this huge amount of money that’s burning a hole in these decision makers pockets,” said Taxpayers for Common Sense President Steve Ellis.
In the report, the U.S. Government Accountability Office outlines six new initiatives ICE has invested significant resources into.
“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.
One of the new initiatives included in the report was the agency buying several warehouses across the nation with the intention to turn them into large-scale detention centers.
In January, DHS paid $70 million for a more than 400,000 square foot facility near Sweetwater Avenue and Dysart Road in Surprise. It later awarded a $313 million contract to GardaWorld to renovate the property.
The purchase caused controversy in the community, and at the end of June the city of Surprise announced the state came to an agreement with DHS and ICE to pause the efforts to convert the property until an environmental review was complete. Earlier this week, the City of Surprise provided GardaWorld with an updated water and wastewater evaluation for the proposed facility.
“They were given a big pile of money, and they rushed to shoot it out there,” Ellis said.
ICE purchased 11 large warehouses across the country for $1.07 billion as part of a plan backed by former DHS Secretary Kristi Noem. But that idea was scrapped amid public opposition before any detainees were housed in them because the department didn’t conduct “appropriate due diligence and planning,” according to the GAO report. DHS is now planning to sell seven of the facilities, although the Surprise facility is not one of those.
ICE has spent $20 million on costs and services related to those seven warehouses that it will not recover, including zoning assessments, title insurance, utilities and security, and will need to sell them for the total purchase price of $707 million to avoid more waste, the report said.
“We knew that this was coming,” Rose Law Group immigration chair Darius Amiri said. “I’m also not someone who thinks that you can’t have a strong and secure border. But at the same time, there’s a way to treat immigrant communities and people, give them their due process that doesn’t involve indefinite or mass detention.”
