The Government Accountability Office has, at last, documented what fiscal conservatives have long feared: a massive waste of taxpayer dollars through incompetent federal bureaucracy. And how has Trump finally achieved this? Since January 2025, ICE spent over $1 billion purchasing eleven warehouses as detention facilities without strategic planning. The agency is now selling seven of those warehouses while writing off over $20 million in unrecoverable security and zoning costs. The agency squandered $2.85 million on unused tents at Guantanamo Bay and $7.1 million on unnecessary meals at El Paso facilities. Meanwhile, Congress has appropriated $45 billion for detention expansion under the OBBBA, locking American taxpayers into over $11 billion annually in detention spending through 2029, regardless of actual enforcement needs. This is government spending without accountability, precisely what you have opposed throughout your career.
Even more troubling are the violations of constitutional protections documented by federal courts. A federal judge in L.A. found that ICE engaged in systematic racial profiling, targeting people based on appearance, language, and occupation rather than actual probable cause. 67% of ICE arrests were of people without criminal convictions; nearly 40% had neither convictions nor charges. Border Czar Tom Homan explicitly stated agents don't need probable cause for detention, a position that contradicts decades of constitutional law. When federal agents operate without meaningful legal constraints or accountability, they become the very unchecked power conservatives warn against. In addition, federal authorities have expanded mandatory detention to include those with no criminal convictions, who are held for weeks at a cost of $152/day. This is mass incarceration built on race-based enforcement, in spite of the fact that research shows that undocumented immigrants commit crimes at lower rates than native-born citizens. A major study analyzing 11,500 neighborhoods across more than 100 U.S. cities found that neighborhoods experiencing growth in undocumented populations actually saw property and violent crime fall, not rise.
So I ask you: If constitutional protections mean nothing in immigration enforcement, whose rights will be next? Today it's immigrants. Tomorrow it could be anyone federal agents decide to target. A government powerful enough to ignore the Fourth Amendment for one group of people possesses the power to ignore it for all groups. That contradicts everything conservatives believe about constitutional limits on federal power.
Reform will require a complete institutional restructuring of the ICE detention system. It cannot be trained, funded, or reformed into compliance because racial profiling and warrantless detention are embedded into its operational foundation. True conservatism demands the rejection, not just of wasteful spending, but unconstitutional government power.
It's time to abolish ICE.
Sign Petition
