ICE Bought Meals for 5,000 People at a Camp That Was Empty — and a federal watchdog put a number on the waste.

For the first two weeks of August 2025, the U.S. Army paid the full cost of running an immigration detention camp that held exactly zero detainees — guards, medical staff, transportation, and three meals a day for a facility built to hold 5,000 people. Nobody was there to eat the food. The Army paid for it anyway.

That is the opening finding of a June 2026 report from the Government Accountability Office on Camp East Montana, the largest immigration detention facility the federal government has ever stood up, built on the grounds of the Army’s Fort Bliss in El Paso, Texas. The contract locked the government into paying for 5,000 meals a day no matter how few people were actually detained — and for months, far fewer were.

The result, per GAO’s own accounting: millions of taxpayer dollars spent on meals that were never needed. This page lays out exactly what was wasted, who signed the contract, why the meal bill kept running after the camp was nearly two-thirds empty, and what it would have taken to stop it — source by source, with the federal audit as the spine.

• $11,500,000 — wasted Aug. 1–15, 2025 on guards, medical, transportation and meals at Camp East Montana while it held no detainees · Source: GAO-26-108886
• $7,100,000 — paid by ICE for meals it did not need, Oct. 1, 2025 – Mar. 12, 2026, after the agency took over the contract · Source: GAO-26-108886
• $423,000 — more the Army paid for unneeded meals Aug. 16 – Sept. 30, 2025, while the camp ran below capacity · Source: GAO-26-108886
• 5,000 vs. ~1,600 — meals ICE paid for daily versus the detainees actually held at the end of February 2026 · Source: GAO-26-108886
• $1,300,000,000 — value of the rushed, non-competitively awarded contract to Acquisition Logistics, a firm with no prior detention experience · Source: GAO; El Paso Matters
• Tens of millions — in additional savings GAO said ICE could have captured through September 2026 with simple tiered meal pricing · Source: GAO-26-108886

Camp East Montana opened to detainees on August 16, 2025. The meals, the medical contract, the guards and the transportation services, however, switched on two weeks earlier. From August 1 through August 15, GAO found, “the Army did not incorporate flexibilities in the contract to account for occupancy levels below the maximum” — so it paid the full cost for a 5,000-person operation while the camp sat empty. The auditors put that two-week tab at up to $11,500,000.

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The food line on that invoice did not stop once detainees arrived. Because the contract priced meals for a fixed 5,000-person population regardless of who was actually inside, the government kept buying thousands of meals more than it needed, day after day. GAO tallied roughly $423,000in unneeded meals from August 16 to September 30, 2025, while the Army still administered the deal. It was, in the watchdog’s plain language, a structural failure to tie spending to reality.

“The Army did not incorporate flexibilities in the contract to account for occupancy levels below the maximum, resulting in millions of dollars in waste.”

GAO-26-108886, Immigration Detention: Waste and Performance Issues at Camp East Montana (June 2026)

The waste did not come out of nowhere. GAO traced it to how the contract was awarded. The Army — which awarded and initially administered the deal, valued at up to $1,300,000,000— and ICE “expedited the award and construction schedule,” the report found, with officials saying the compressed timelines were “directed by senior leadership.” To move that fast, they reached for a contracting vehicle that had not previously been used for detention services and selected Acquisition Logistics, a contractor that, per GAO, “did not have prior experience providing detention services.”

Administration of the contract passed from the Army to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement on October 1, 2025. The handoff did not fix the meal problem — it inherited it. And the operator struggled in other ways the audit catalogued: ICE issued a discrepancy report after the contractor lost a loaded firearm that was never recovered, flagged gaps in medical care, and documented unsanitary conditions. By April 2026, ICE had terminated Acquisition Logistics’ contract “for convenience” and brought in a replacement operator, Amentum — a firm that had been working as a subcontractor at the same camp.

The single most expensive flaw GAO identified was the meal pricing itself. The contract obligated the government to pay for meals for the camp’s maximum population — 5,000 people — every day, even though the real population ran far below that. At the end of February 2026, the facility held about 1,600 detainees. The government was, in effect, buying more than 3,000 meals a day that no one would eat, and writing a check for them anyway.

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From October 1, 2025 through March 12, 2026 — the ICE-administered stretch — the agency “paid about $7,100,000 for meals it did not need,” GAO wrote. Add the Army’s earlier $423,000, and the meal overpayments alone clear $7,500,000 before the headline $11,500,000of empty-camp spending is even counted. The fix GAO described was not exotic: tiered pricing that scales the meal bill to the actual headcount, the kind of operational flexibility Customs and Border Protection already uses at its soft-sided facilities. The auditors estimated that incorporating those measures could have saved ICE “tens of millions of dollars” through September 2026.

GAO issued four recommendations, and both the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Defense concurred with them. The one that goes straight at the food bill: that ICE incorporate cost-saving measures — tiered pricing for meals and other services — into detention-facility contracts so spending tracks occupancy instead of a fixed maximum. On paper, agreement. In practice, GAO noted a gap.

When ICE awarded the replacement contract, GAO found, it “does not yet include tiered pricing or operational status tiers.” In other words, the agency that had just been told exactly how it was bleeding money on phantom meals signed a new deal without the safeguard — and, per the report, “continued to pay for meals that it did not need.” That is the part of this story that turns a one-time rush into an ongoing one: the lesson was identified, agreed to, and then not yet applied to the contract actually in force.

An honest account names the caveats. The $11,500,000two-week figure is GAO’s estimate of total operating cost during the empty stretch, not a meals-only number — the meal-specific overpayments are the $423,000 and $7,100,000figures. Standing up the nation’s largest detention facility under a compressed timeline involves real fixed costs that do not vanish just because beds are empty, and some ramp-up spending is unavoidable. GAO frames this as a lessons-learned audit for future facilities, not an allegation of fraud, and no one has been charged with anything. Those distinctions matter, and we keep them.

But the load-bearing facts are not in dispute, because the federal government’s own auditors put them on the record. The Army paid full freight for an empty camp. The contract priced meals for 5,000 when about 1,600 people were inside. ICE paid roughly $7,100,000for meals it did not need over five months, then signed a replacement contract that still lacked the tiered pricing that would have stopped it. A simple contract clause — the kind CBP already uses — would have saved tens of millions. That is not a partisan reading of the report. It is the report.

A rushed $1,300,000,000contract, awarded without competition to a firm with no detention experience, put the federal government on the hook to feed 5,000 people whether or not 5,000 people were there to feed. For two weeks, none were — and the bill ran anyway, to the tune of up to $11,500,000. Over the months that followed, ICE paid about $7,100,000more for meals nobody ate, and even after a federal watchdog spelled out the fix, signed a new contract without it. The total preventable waste, GAO concluded, ran into the tens of millions. We’ll track whether ICE finally builds tiered meal pricing into the active contract, and what the replacement operator’s bills actually look like.

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