GAO report flags waste and oversight failures at ICE's Camp East Montana

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GAO report flags ICE waste

Highlights

GAO report finds ICE's Camp East Montana, a 5,000-bed facility at Fort Bliss, wastes tens of millions and fails basic detention, oversight, and health care standards.
Detention incidents include a homicide by use of force, a suicide resulting from monitoring failures, missing evidence, and a loaded firearm lost and unrecovered inside the camp.
Rushed Army-led contracting bypassed ICE specialists and yielded a $1.3 billion contract, with GAO warning new $38 billion warehouse conversions risk magnifying governance failures.

Report findings on detention conditions

As reported by the Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Democratic lawmakers led by Senate Democratic Whip Dick Durbin are publishing the GAO review of Camp East Montana, described as ICE's largest-ever detention facility, a 5,000-bed soft-sided camp at Fort Bliss created in a rushed effort to detain immigrants.

The report says the facility wastes tens of millions of taxpayer dollars, opens without meeting basic detention standards and continues to face serious performance and oversight problems tied to health care, use of force and suicide prevention.

Among the incidents cited, a detainee is killed in a use-of-force episode that a county coroner rules a homicide, with related evidence missing or destroyed. Another detainee dies by suicide after being placed in the wrong room and left unmonitored, while a TB-positive detainee is housed in the general population after required testing is skipped.

The GAO review also says detainees with diabetes and HIV do not have treatment plans, and that a loaded firearm is lost inside the facility and never recovered. Durbin, Jack Reed, Gary Peters and Bennie Thompson say the findings show dangerous conditions, inadequate safeguards and major waste under the administration's detention buildup.

Contracting risks and broader industry impact

The report links the failures in part to a rushed contracting process in which the Army uses WEXMAC, a military logistics vehicle not designed for detention operations, selects an inexperienced contractor based on the lowest available price and excludes ICE's own contracting specialists from the process.

Lawmakers say that approach leaves ICE with a $1.3 billion contract it does not design and cannot effectively enforce, increasing operational and compliance risks for federal detention programs and private contractors working in the sector.

GAO warns that applying its recommendations is essential as ICE finalizes a new contract. The watchdog also says ICE's planned $38 billion program to convert warehouses into detention facilities through the same contracting vehicle risks repeating the same failures on a much larger scale.

Our earlier coverage of federal public buildings reforms explained how agencies are being pushed to cut excess office space, meet new utilization benchmarks, and improve oversight of government property as 2024 reforms move into implementation. We noted that lawmakers were scrutinizing delays, data-quality problems in occupancy reporting, and long-standing weaknesses in federal real estate management that keep it on the GAO high-risk list.

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