Fox calls $575 immigrant civics class a taxpayer scheme; audited millions in empty ICE cells draw no headline

…(cont) Now open the drawer filed three days before the Boston item ran. On September 25, a Thursday, the Government Accountability Office published an audit of ICE's detention buildout: six facilities, billions of dollars, and findings that some of that money went to facilities and services that were never used, were abandoned soon after they opened, or cost far more than the agency needed to pay. Common Dreams read that audit and put "deadly" and "wasted" in its own headline over the crackdown behind it — those are the outlet's words for what the audit found, not language pulled from the GAO's own report. The underlying finding is still the government's: six facilities, money spent on space that sat unused or closed early.

Line the three up, hon. Five hundred seventy-five dollars to teach an immigrant how local government works gets a Fox News chyron calling it a scheme that shuts citizens out. Fifty thousand dollars to keep a deported worker's kids housed gets called a slush fund. Millions of dollars — the audit counts it by facility, not in one round number, and six facilities is not pocket change — spent on detention space the government's own auditors found sitting empty or shutting down early gets no chyron in this batch of wire copy at all.

That's not an accounting error. That's where the ledger's owners drew the line: under a thousand dollars a head, spent near an immigrant, it's a scheme. Nine and ten figures, spent on a facility built and then closed, is overhead, filed under a column nobody in this week's coverage bothered to open. Same week, same government's money, two different columns — one that gets circled, and one that just sits in the drawer where the auditors left it.