A government watchdog says the Trump administration wasted millions of dollars and put detainees and staff at risk while rushing to build the largest immigration detention camp in the country.
The Government Accountability Office report, released Tuesday, examined Camp East Montana, a soft-sided detention facility built on the Army’s Fort Bliss in El Paso, Texas. The Army awarded a $1.3 billion contract for the site in July 2025 and it opened in August, intended to hold up to 5,000 detained noncitizens. It is currently ICE’s largest detention facility.
How the money was wasted
GAO found the Army built no flexibility into the fixed-price contract to account for periods when the facility held fewer detainees than its full capacity. Between August 1 and August 15, 2025, before any detainees had arrived, the Army paid the full cost of guards, medical services, transportation and meals anyway, wasting up to $11.5 million. Because the contract set a fixed meal price based on the facility’s full 5,000-person capacity, the Army then paid about $423,000 for meals it did not need through the end of September as the facility ramped up below capacity.
ICE took over the contract on October 1, 2025, and kept paying the same way. By the end of February 2026, the facility held about 1,600 detainees, but ICE was still paying to feed 5,000. GAO calculated ICE spent roughly $7.1 million on unneeded meals between October 2025 and March 2026 alone. Investigators estimated ICE could save tens of millions more through September 2026 if it adopted tiered pricing, the kind of flexible billing GAO had recommended after a similar problem at a Texas facility in 2020.
Safety and oversight gaps
The facility opened without required accommodations in several areas, according to the report: no perimeter security cameras, no wheelchair-accessible showers, insufficient outdoor recreation space and no working attorney-visitation area for roughly two weeks. ICE never conducted the pre-occupancy inspection its own policy requires before housing detainees in a new facility, so none of this surfaced before people were moved in.
Problems continued after ICE took over oversight. A contractor used symptom questionnaires instead of required tuberculosis skin tests, and in November 2025 a detainee with tuberculosis was housed with the general population. A security guard lost a loaded firearm in January 2026 that was never recovered. That same month, a detainee died by suicide after being left unattended in a medical holding room rather than a suicide-resistant cell, and another died of asphyxia in a case the local coroner ruled a homicide; GAO found the contractor did not file the required use-of-force report and that evidence in the case was missing or destroyed. None of the detainees with HIV or diabetes had treatment plans in place, GAO found, and one detainee escaped in October 2025 in an incident investigators attributed to the contractor’s inability to track who was in custody.
What GAO recommends
GAO issued four recommendations: that ICE adopt tiered pricing in its detention contracts, that ICE build in controls to guarantee pre-occupancy inspections actually happen, and that both the Army and the Department of Homeland Security formally document lessons learned from Camp East Montana before applying them elsewhere. DHS and the Department of Defense agreed with all four, though DOD objected to how the report characterized its role.
The findings carry weight beyond one facility. ICE’s average daily detained population rose 71 percent between January 2025 and April 2026, and the agency is now moving ahead with a separate $38 billion plan to convert warehouses into detention space using the same contracting approach GAO flagged as a source of the waste at Camp East Montana. GAO explicitly warned the same failures could recur at a much larger scale. It is a concern raised in other watchdog reviews of rapidly built detention sites, and it comes as courts separately weigh how much process is owed to people held in expanding ICE custody.
Sen. Jack Reed of Rhode Island, the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said in a statement that the failures were “the direct result of the Pentagon cutting corners and handing a billion-dollar contract to an inexperienced vendor that wrote its own performance standards.” Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, the top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, called the report “damning.”