Joe Biden's decision to ban the Bureau of Prisons from contracting with private detention companies did not just shrink capacity — it drove up the cost of locking up criminal migrants, according to a new report from the Government Accountability Office.
Biden, the 46th President, reinstated an Obama-era policy just days after taking office in January 2021, setting in motion a phase-out of BOP contracts with a handful of privately managed prisons that almost entirely hold foreign nationals convicted of federal crimes. At the time, he billed the move as part of his so-called "racial equity" agenda.
Here is what that agenda actually bought: private detention centers contracted by BOP tend to be substantially less expensive than federal facilities, so shutting them down meant the agency had to pay more per bed to house the same population. Breitbart News first reported the GAO findings. The BOP was never the place to make a political point — it is where people convicted of federal crimes serve their time, and taxpayers foot the bill either way.
The Warning No One Heeded
Executives with the National Immigration Center for Enforcement say they saw this coming and said so from the start.
"The report is an opportunity for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to build out billions in detention space rather than focusing on what he calls 'stunts' like tents in Florida's Everglades and Guantanamo."
That is NICE President RJ Hauman, who told Breitbart News the GAO report should push DHS toward serious detention construction instead of headline-grabbing setups.
Hauman has a point worth pausing on. Capacity is not an abstraction. When the federal government lacks beds, criminal migrants get released into American communities on the street — and the cost is not measured in dollars at all.
The Guantanamo Tab
The same watchdog, in a separate Sept. 24 report, found the Pentagon spent $2.85 million assembling tents at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, that were never used to house detained noncitizens. A January 2025 presidential memorandum had directed DHS and DOD to boost detention capacity at Naval Station Guantanamo Bay to 30,000 beds. DOD put up tents for an initial 5,000 — then DHS determined they did not meet detention standards. The tents came down.
The Defense Department reported obligating roughly $68 million for immigration detention from Oct. 1, 2024, through May 31, 2026, according to the GAO. The Guantanamo operation was one of six new detention-expansion initiatives ICE pursued without first developing a comprehensive strategic plan. By July 2026, ICE had scaled back four of the six, resulting in wasted or potentially wasted resources.
At Fort Bliss in El Paso, Texas, the Army awarded and administered a $1.3 billion task order on behalf of ICE for Camp East Montana, a soft-sided facility that opened in August 2025. The Army handed contract administration to ICE at the start of fiscal 2026. A separate GAO report found the Army wasted up to $11.5 million on services at that facility.
A GAO report published last week and covered by Gadget Review tallied $45 billion spent against just 16 detainees held, citing missing price ceilings, unverifiable data access and unchecked spending across ICE and other agencies. Those are the numbers of a government that never seriously planned to detain anyone — it planned to be seen trying.
Where The Money Was Never Spent
The comparison writes itself. Private facilities sat cheaper and ready, while Biden's political commitments starved the system of the beds it needed. Hauman's answer is straightforward: build out billions in actual detention space, not tents that violate the standards the government itself set.
The Supreme Court has now agreed to review President Donald Trump's policy of imposing mandatory detention without bond hearings for people who entered the country illegally, CNN reported Thursday. That case — one of the administration's most aggressive immigration moves — will decide whether the deterrent stays on the books.
In the meantime, the Biden-era prohibition that made federal detention more expensive for taxpayers stands as one of the clearest examples yet of what happens when policy is written to satisfy a slogan instead of a spreadsheet.
Our Take
This is the Biden legacy in one GAO document: a government that spent more money to lock up fewer criminals, then explained the failure as equity. The American taxpayer paid for the gesture, and the families living near the detention centers that never opened paid for it in safety.
Why did the private facilities go first? Because contracts with private companies are an easy target for the Left's anti-corporate posturing, and nobody in the Biden administration wanted to defend a line item. The savings from private detention are not a secret — they were the reason the contracts existed. Banning them was a choice to make the country's immigration enforcement weaker and expensive on purpose.
Trump ran on restoring enforcement, and that costs money too. The difference is whether the money gets spent on beds and holds up in federal court, or evaporates into unused tents and abandoned plans. Congress should demand the GAO's full accounting of every dollar obligated since October 2024 — and DHS should start signing contracts with operators who can build capacity now, before the Supreme Court weighs in.
Every day Patriot families wait for Washington to get this right is another day the border math is being done at their expense. The report is on the table. What gets built from it?
