If we’re all so fired up about eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse from government programs, we’d better defund Trump’s goon squad. The Government Accountability Office finds the Department of Homeland Security has wasted millions on its poorly planned expansion of Immigration and Customs Enforcement:
In the report, GAO found those detention expansion efforts wasted millions by using facilities that were high in cost or impractical, such as Naval Station Guantanamo Bay, which is so remote that water needs to be imported to the base, making it a costly operation.
Inspectors with the Department of Defense and Department of State estimated that DOD spent $2.85 million to assemble tents that were never used and that ICE obligated $43 million from the start of fiscal year 2025 to June 30, 2026 for a small population at the base. GAO found that 16 noncitizens were held on average daily at Guantanamo in fiscal year 2026.
Other efforts that lacked proper planning also included domestic military operations, such as the soft-sided facility, Camp East Montana, built on a military base in El Paso, Texas.
GAO previously reported that ICE wasted more than $11 million in taxpayer funds in operating Camp East Montana, such as paying for meals when detainees had not yet arrived at the facility. Investigators noted that ICE had awarded another contract in March for Camp East Montana and “as of August 2026 had not yet incorporated these cost saving measures into the contract and continued to pay for services that it did not need” [Ariana Figueroa, “Millions of Dollars of Waste Found in Trump Administration Push for Immigration Detention,” South Dakota Searchlight, 2026.09.24].
Trump and Stephen Miller’s white-supremacist crusade of fear and loathing will saddle us with more wasteful spending in the future:
Investigators also raised concerns that ICE has not made an assessment for the long-term cost of operating the expanded detention facilities.
“ICE has not projected the costs of these facilities beyond the first 3 years of operation, after which ICE will no longer have OBBBA and Secure America Act funds available for obligation because these funds are only available through fiscal year 2029,” according to the report [Figueroa, 2026.09.24].
Along with unnecessarily ruining human lives, ICE is wasting taxpayer dollars. Whether you’re an immigrant-loving liberal or a common-sense conservative budget hawk, tell your Congress critters to defund ICE now!
so close all the detention centers and deport them all.
I agree: detaining them is a waste of money,
Why are we detaining them?
Why not resurrect Spirit Airlines and fly them home?
South Dakota is one big detention center so there is that.
South Dakota’s school to prison pipeline accelerated in 1983 when Republican Governor Bill Janklow converted the University of South Dakota at Springfield into a prison; then his people killed Gina Score in a boot camp, ended environmental protection and drove the red moocher state’s descent into the hellish chemical toilet it is today.
As of June 30, 2025 there were 1,709 children in South Dakota’s child welfare system and 1,201 (70%) of them were Indigenous Americans. Today, the Lakota People’s Law Project, NDN Collective and other Indigenous organizations seek foster families and homes because SD Department of Social Services employees in Rapid City flout the Indian Child Welfare Act. Since South Dakota receives some $80,000 from the federal government for each child the state seizes about 750 American Indian kids every year reaping well over a billion federal dollars since ICWA was enacted and radicalizes yet another generation.
So, South Dakota Republicans love the police state as women are being incarcerated at the highest rates on Earth and triple the US average but the state’s law enforcement industry wants that number to be even higher. In a state that sells freedom sobriety checkpoints, especially near reservation borders, mean South Dakota has the highest number of DUI arrests per capita. Between 2021 and 2025 South Dakota arrested 8,220 women for drunk driving at the second highest rate in the nation in a state where it’s reported that sixty seven percent of Native American women reoffend.
Algebra, with an avocado costing $1,49 apiece, I’d rather not deport those who work damn hard to pick them. Do you realize how much this is changing everyone’s lives? We are all stuck in Trump’s reality show without commercials, insane and inhumane.
American citizens–many only a generation or two from immigrant parents and grandparents themselves–are cowed into silence as massive arrests and disregard for American law occur across the country.
South Dakota’s Washington delegation– Thune, Rounds, Johnson and Noem–lead and extravagantly fund this shameful mass deportation effort for Donald Trump and Stephen Miller. “Me Too” Gov. Rhoden’s Prairie Thunder operation and county sheriffs 287 (g) programs support this effort in South Dakota.
9/25/2026 NY Times
A Quiet ICE Surge That Unfolded ‘Everywhere All at Once’ This Summer
A review of dozens of incidents caught on camera sheds new light on a largely invisible crackdown.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/25/us/ice-surge-immigration-arrests.html
9/19/2026 Guardian
Trump ally Stephen Miller leads sweeping push to accelerate removal of migrant children Exclusive: key White House loyalist orchestrating multi-agency effort condemned by critics as cruel and racist
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/sep/19/stephen-miller-trump-migrant-children
The real kick in the crotch for those who LOVE the idea of deporting “those” people is that independent trackers note that overall monthly removal numbers under Trump’s second term have remained close to or slightly below Biden’s late-term record highs.
Like everything Trump does, we are paying for a show.
Not to mention little things like the absolute, deliberate cruelty, rape, starvation and lack of medical attention to any of the human beings trapped in ICE detention centers.
THEY’RE CONCENTRATION CAMPS, PEOPLE!!!!
Well Algebra, the worst of the worst are put on flights chained and find out where home is later. Its rather like blowing up boats and claiming they are full of drugs. Now, back in the day they used to stop those boats and search them. One quarter of those boats were drug fee. So between the arrests and outright let God sort them out killings its just hard to see the waste of money being done by blithering idiots.
Now I know you like the incognito just like the ICE boys do but really?
Eve and Mark, welcome to the Pro-Life GOP!!?
Funny how supporters and opponents of the current government actions labeling and persecuting a group of individuals people seem to miss the problem (it is even a problem) of giving government officials the power to label a particular group or groups of individuals and then use the force of the government (outside the realm of criminal law) to harm the labeled groups.
In 1930’s Germany the government officials picked Jewish families, Roma families, and other specific groups of individuals. In Stalin’s Russia, communists picked Crimean Tatars, Chechens, Ingush, Volga Germans, and Korean as the ethnic groups to persecute. In South Africa at the turn of the 19th century the British picked rural Boer populations and indigenous Africans. In 1994 Rwanda the Hutu-led government picked the Tutsi. In the early 20th century the Ottoman government picked Christian Armenians. And in the good old USA history there are examples of groups picked by government officials that include blacks, Native Americans, Chinese, Japanese, among others (which shames most people and apparently even shames the Trump Administration given that governmental effort to rewrite history and whitewash or eliminate reference to our own country’s atrocities)
I guess this history suggests that giving the certain individuals government power will always lead to labeling and persecuting groups of people that have harmed no one. Current Trump actions labeling and persecuting people based on where they were born is probably consistent with much world history. I suppose for most people to accept this they simply think like Pastor Martin Niemöller (“First they came for the . . . but I was not a . . . so I didn’t speak out”).
For me, I speak out because I don’t think any government officials should have the power to simply label groups of otherwise harmless people and use government force, deadly or otherwise, to persecute or murder them. I have no doubt that future generations will see our current treatment of immigrants in the same way we now see Germany’s 1930’s and 40’s governmental treatment of labeled groups.