A new Government Accountability Office report confirms what immigration enforcement advocates warned about for years: Joe Biden’s decision to bar the Bureau of Prisons from contracting with private detention companies drove up costs for American taxpayers while doing nothing to reduce the number of criminal migrants behind bars.
Days after taking office in January 2021, Biden revived an Obama-era policy phasing out BOP’s contracts with privately managed prisons that hold foreign nationals convicted of federal crimes. Biden framed the move as part of his “racial equity” agenda.
The numbers tell a different story. According to the GAO, BOP’s cost to incarcerate noncitizens rose 17 percent between fiscal year 2021 and fiscal year 2023, from $935 million to $1.1 billion, even though the number of noncitizens held in custody stayed roughly flat. Adjusted for inflation into 2025 dollars, that’s still a 5 percent increase, from $1.1 billion to $1.15 billion.
The GAO pinned the increase in part on the timing of BOP’s exit from private detention contracts, which it called the agency’s “lowest cost facility type.” Holding a criminal migrant in a privately operated facility cost 22 to 35 percent less than holding the same person in a BOP-run low-security facility, the report found.
By fiscal year 2023, the year BOP’s last private detention contract expired, nearly half of all BOP-held noncitizens, 48 percent, were sitting in BOP-operated low-security facilities, a sharp jump from before Biden’s order took effect.
“Nobody Listened”
Executives with the National Immigration Center for Enforcement say they flagged the problem months before the GAO confirmed it.
“Mark Morgan said all of this in July 2025. Warned that $250-per-day beds and side deals with states were for show, would burn money, and blow the best chance in decades to entrench the one thing immigration enforcement can’t run without: real detention facilities,” NICE executives wrote on X. “Nobody listened. GAO just put it in writing.”
NICE President RJ Hauman told Breitbart News the findings give the Department of Homeland Security a clear opening to invest in permanent detention capacity instead of what he called “stunts,” pointing specifically to the tent facility built in Florida’s Everglades, along with the use of Guantanamo Bay.
“Traditional custodial detention runs a median of $92 a day, and GAO found ICE never even weighed its experiments against it,” Hauman said. “Mass deportation doesn’t happen without permanent beds at scale, and that money runs out in 2029. DHS can still get this right, but not if it spends another year relearning what every career official already knew.”
The report lands as DHS weighs how to expand detention capacity amid an ongoing push for mass deportations, with billions of dollars in funding on the table and a 2029 deadline looming over how it gets spent.
