Feds spent $66 million on a temporary immigrant detention center that was hardly used

The Golden Horseshoe is a weekly designation from Just the News intended to highlight egregious examples of wasteful taxpayer spending by the government. The award is named for the horseshoe-shaped toilet seats for military airplanes that cost the Pentagon a whopping $640 each back in the 1980s. 

This week, our award is being given to Customs and Border Protection (CBP), a division of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), for spending $66 million in five months on a temporary, 2,500-person immigration detention facility that housed an average of just 30 detainees a day, and never more than 66 at once.

According to a report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO), CBP paid a private contractor $47 million to establish the detention center in El Paso, Texas and run the facility's support services, such as “meal services, guard services, toilets, and showers."

The report notes that CBP spent about $5.3 million on “the preparation and delivery of meals and snacks” that it did not need. Talk about abusing the corporate credit card — but in this case the credit card is the taxpayer’s wallet.

The facility was ordering food services (three meals a day) for the full capacity of the facility — 2,500 adults — when the center was only housing an average of 28 adults per day. According to the calculations in the report, that means the CBP paid for 675,000 meals in the first three months, when they only needed 13,428.

Another major unnecessary cost at the facility was the excessive number of personnel onsite. The report calculates that for each detainee being held at the facility, there were on average four members of the Texas National Guard, three contracted security guards, and one CBP enforcement officer.

Apparently, the CBP officials in charge of negotiating the facility’s supply contracts failed to structure a deal that provided “flexibility to adjust pricing when the actual number of detainees was far less than expected.”

DHS then had the opportunity to close the facility after three months of operating at just 1% capacity. Instead, the department decided to keep it open for another eight weeks, which cost the taxpayers an additional $19 million.

One issue the report highlights is the failure to communicate among officials within the same agency. The CBP is comprised of about 60,000 federal employees, several of whom gave different answers when asked by the GAO why the facility remained open for another two months past its initial trial period, despite consistently low numbers and overestimated costs.

Several Border Patrol officials in El Paso reported recommending that the facility be closed and the resources reallocated to other CBP missions. However, CBP headquarters officials told the GAO that despite the clear underuse of the facility, they decided to extend the timeline because they were “operating in an environment with considerable uncertainty related to migrant flow and wanted to prepare for the possibility of increased apprehensions,” read the report.

Additionally, some CBP officials claimed that the facility’s operational timeline was extended because they believed that several new DHS programs might require use of the property as they went into effect. However, other CBP officials clarified that in late October (before the El Paso facility’s operations were extended) it was determined that DHS would not be using the holding center for their new initiatives.

All in all, the report concludes, DHS spent $66 million in U.S. taxpayer funds over the course of five months on a next-to-useless immigration holding facility and then missed its chance to shut it down and cut its losses due to intra-agency misalignment.

The report was initially requested by a handful of powerful Democratic senators and the chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security.