The rush that built 'small metal enclosures' is the rush a watchdog now finds wasted millions.

By RuthThe Money Desk

“Trump's ICE Wasted Millions of Dollars on Deadly Immigrant Detention Drive: Audit”, 25 September 2026 (Photo via Common Dreams — the original report)

As it ran on the front

The Government Accountability Office did the counting. Since January 2025, ICE has poured billions of dollars into six separate detention-expansion initiatives, the GAO's audit found, without what the auditors call "the necessary analysis and planning" to know whether the spending was needed, affordable, or capable of meeting federal detention standards. The audit's own words for the result: "millions of dollars of waste."

Eleven days before that audit landed, on September 14, a different watchdog had already priced out one piece of the same rush. DHS's internal inspector general found that detainees at the Florida facility known as Alligator Alcatraz, now closed, were held in "cramped conditions," some in what the report called "small metal enclosures."…

…(cont) CBS News, summarizing the audit, called the spending an "unprecedented budget." The GAO's own language stayed narrower and colder: waste, poor planning, six initiatives launched without the analysis to justify any of them.

Run the other ledger from the same stretch. On September 3, independent analyst Charles Gaba published a count: up to 10 million people have lost health coverage since this term began. The next day, September 4, the arithmetic moved to the cafeteria: the 2025 budget law's cuts to SNAP — the largest cut to the program since its inception more than six decades ago — pushed enrollment to its lowest level in 17 years, putting roughly five million people, 1.5 million of them children, at risk of losing free school meals.

Put the two ledgers side by side, hon. Billions went into cells the government's own inspectors say were too small and too rushed to meet the government's own standards, with millions of that spending confirmed wasted. In the same stretch, up to 10 million people lost health coverage and roughly five million lost food assistance. Nothing here requires an adjective. The dates are eleven days apart on one ledger and the same term-long stretch on the other, filed by the government's own watchdogs and its own data. The gap is the story, and it is denominated in dollars either way.

From the Corner

Dutch

The GAO counted billions poured into six ICE detention initiatives since January 2025 with, in its own words, no planning to justify the spending, and eleven days earlier DHS's inspector general had already found detainees packed into "small metal enclosures" at a facility built in that same rush. That isn't a rushed rollout, it's a spending script written backward: build the cage first, discover the budget second, call the gap between them an audit finding instead of what it is. The billions didn't vanish into planning — the audit found none was done — they went into concrete and contracts, paid out whether the cells met federal standards or not, and the same year that waste got logged, the free-meal notice on your kid's backpack picked up one new word: reduced.

“They tell you there's no money for your kid's lunch, but there's plenty of money for cells too small for the people the government put in them — and millions of that got wasted on top. Same year, same government, two different watchdogs, eleven days apart, one pricing the cages and one pricing the checkbook. That's not incompetence, that's where the priority sits, and it isn't sitting with the lunch tray.”

Sal

“Look, when you scale up detention capacity that fast under that kind of political demand, sure, a few million dollars of waste happen — that's what responsiveness costs, you don't get speed without some friction. Did I say friction? That's not the term GAO used, forget I said that. Planning takes time this administration didn't have, so blame the timeline, not the agency.”

Chip

The receipts

Republicans' reconciliation package puts $70 billion into ICE's department NBC News, May 2026

ICE wasted millions in taxpayer dollars in rush to expand detention capacity, watchdog says

CBS Newsmainstream§17:26 EDT

The Government Accountability Office reports that Immigration and Customs Enforcement wasted millions of taxpayer dollars in a rush to expand its detention capacity. CBS News data journalist Julia Ingram has the details.

Trump's ICE Wasted Millions of Dollars on Deadly Immigrant Detention Drive: Audit

Common Dreams§17:37 EDT

The Trump administration's deadly immigration crackdown has not only resulted in widespread abuse of detained immigrants, it has also wasted millions of dollars on facilities and services that were never used, were quickly abandoned, or were far more expensive than necessary, according to an audit published Thursday by the Government…

~~ICE wasted millions in rapid push to expand detention capacity, watchdog finds~~ ICE got a $70 billion budget - and still wasted millions expanding jails, watchdog finds

CBS Newsmainstream§19:25 EDT

With an unprecedented budget, ICE spent billions in a rush to expand its detention network, wasting millions in the process, the Government Accountability Office found.

· Alligator Alcatraz had cramped conditions, "small metal enclosures," watchdog finds from the morgue, 14 Sep 2026

· Analysis Finds Up to 10 Million People Have Lost Healthcare Coverage During Trump's Second Term from the morgue, 3 Sep 2026

· ‘Obviously Going to Increase Hunger’: Trump SNAP Cuts Imperil Free School Meals for Millions of Kids from the morgue, 4 Sep 2026

This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.