The Trump administration bought 11 warehouses in 2026 to turn into immigrant detention centers. It paid about $1.07 billion for them. Now it wants to sell seven.
That's the finding of the Government Accountability Office — the nonpartisan watchdog that works for Congress — in a report released September 24, 2026. Its title says it all: "Urgent Planning Needed to Avoid Further Waste of Taxpayer Dollars."
Since January 2025, ICE has "invested billions" in six new ways to hold more people, the GAO found. It did so "without conducting necessary analysis and planning." The result, in the watchdog's words: an approach "that has resulted in millions of dollars of waste."
$20 million gone for good
The warehouse plan is the clearest example.
ICE bought the 11 buildings in the first four months of 2026, the Washington Sun reported. By June, ICE officials were telling the GAO they were working to sell seven of them.
Before changing course, ICE spent more than $20 million on those buildings that it can't recover — money for things like zoning studies, utilities and security guards for warehouses it now plans to get rid of. According to the Sun, that includes $7.7 million on costs like zoning and nearly $13 million on utilities, security and other services.
And the losses could get bigger. ICE paid millions more for the warehouses than earlier buyers and appraisers valued them at, the Sun reported. If it sells them for less than it paid, taxpayers eat the difference.
Warehouse detention centers have run into fierce local opposition. In Missouri, Kansas City's council voted 12 to 1 to block one — and a Republican congressman wrote ICE offering his own district instead.
No plan for billions more
The warehouses aren't the only problem. The GAO found waste "is also evident in other initiatives."
The deeper issue is that ICE has no road map. According to the GAO, the agency:
- Has not set consistent goals for how many detention beds it needs or what kind.
- Has not weighed the cost of high-priced facilities against cheaper options it already uses.
- Has no comprehensive strategic plan — goals, activities and resource needs — to guide its spending.
The GAO recommended ICE write one. The Department of Homeland Security agreed. But ICE doesn't expect to finish it until August 31, 2027. Given ICE's "unprecedented multi-year detention funding," the watchdog wrote, it may need to move faster.
Where the money came from
That funding came from Republicans in Congress. Trump's 2025 budget bill set aside $45 billion over four years for immigration detention — a 400% increase in ICE's yearly detention budget, by the Brennan Center's math. It passed on party-line votes.
So Republicans handed an agency a flood of money with no plan for how to spend it, and the agency spent it the way you'd expect. We've seen what that detention buildout looks like on the ground: federal inspectors found Florida's "Alligator Alcatraz" held 79 people in metal cages about four feet wide. And nearly 90% of people in ICE custody are held in for-profit facilities, an industry whose political money we've traced to Republicans in Congress.
The same party that says it's cracking down on government waste watched ICE spend $1 billion on warehouses, most of which it's now trying to sell.
What the GAO found
Trump's ICE spent about $1.07 billion on 11 warehouses to turn into detention centers without the planning the GAO says it needed, then decided to sell seven, after spending more than $20 million it can't get back. The GAO found the agency has no strategic plan for its detention buildout, which Republicans funded with $45 billion from Trump's budget bill, and ICE says it won't have one until August 2027.
Sources
- Immigration Detention: Urgent Planning Needed to Avoid Further Waste of Taxpayer Dollars (GAO-26-108663) — U.S. Government Accountability Office, September 24, 2026
- A Watchdog Says ICE Wasted Millions in Its Detention Expansion — The Washington Sun, September 24, 2026
Photo: Ross D. Franklin/AP, via The Washington Sun.
