US supreme court allows Trump officials to resume deportations to third countries | US supreme court | The Guardian

US supreme court allows Trump officials to resume deportations to third countries

"Conservative majority temporarily lifts lower-court decision as liberal justices dissent from ruling

Ariana Baio and Maanvi Singh

People at an immigration hearing in New York in August. Photograph: Spencer Platt/Getty Images

The Trump administration can resume quickly deporting immigrants to “third countries”, or countries other than those immigrants’ homeland, without giving them any opportunity to contest their removals, the supreme court ruled on Tuesday.

The six-justice conservative majority of the high court temporarily lifted a lower-court decision that required the administration to provide immigrants sufficient notice and the opportunity to claim fear of torture or persecution in the countries where they are being sent. The Trump administration had claimed this stipulation had prevented it from “efficiently removing aliens” from the US.

As is typical in emergency orders, the justices did not explain why it granted the administration’s request.

The three liberal justices of the court, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, dissented from the order.

Tuesday’s ruling will take effect while the supreme court considers the larger question in the case. Justices said they would hear oral arguments in December.

It is the second time the supreme court has sided with the Trump administration over “third-country” deportations.

Todd Blanche, the attorney general, called the administration’s policies “entirely lawful and a critical tool for immigration enforcement” in a social media post following the supreme court’s order.

“Unlike the lower court, SCOTUS waited to hear from both sides before making the decision,” Blanche wrote.

The supreme court’s intervention comes days after the administration filed an emergency request to the justices, hoping to continue deporting immigrants to third countries – including those that the US state department considers dangerous.

The Trump administration has entered into a series of agreements with other countries that have allowed it to deport more than 25,000 immigrants to at least 29 countries, according to Third Country Deportation ​Watch, a project run by Refugees International and Human Rights First.

Countries that have received US deportees include the Central African Republic, which is grappling with unrest and terrorism due to political and militia instability, and South Sudan, where a humanitarian crisis has been unfolding because of political and economic collapse.

On Monday, two dozen UN human rights experts warned that the deportation of thousands of migrants from the US to third countries has set off a “cascade of human rights violations” that could have “deadly” consequences.

Many third-country deportees have faced dire conditions and violence after they ended up in countries without any legal status. Earlier this month, two men that the Trump administration expelled to Equatorial Guinea were bound, fitted with bags over their heads, beaten and pushed down a flight of stairs, all in plain view of other US deportees, according to witnesses and human rights lawyers. Detainees said the men were facing retaliation for speaking to journalists and human rights experts about the poor conditions they faced.

“This cruel and inhumane policy is a black eye on Lady Liberty,” said Adelita Grijalva, a Democratic representative from Arizona. “We are a nation that promises to welcome the ‘poor’ and ‘huddled masses’ yearning for freedom. Instead, we are sending vulnerable people into harm’s way – and, in some cases, potentially to their deaths.”

One of the men who was beaten in Equatorial Guinea was her constituent, Ahmed Soliman – a gay man from Egypt who had fled discrimination in his home country and spent most of his life in Phoenix.

Lawyers for the immigrants have challenged the “third country” deportation policy, arguing that they had not been given “notice and a meaningful opportunity to present fear-based claims”.

Lawyers for the administration have said there’s no need for individual fear-based claims because countries willing to accept immigrants have already agreed not to persecute or torture anyone. Solicitor general D John Sauer, the government’s attorney, wrote to the supreme court that the lower-court orders “created substantial logistical problems with ongoing removal operations – including the cancellation of flights – and led to added expense, potential diplomatic issues, and the inability to remove dangerous criminals”.

Prior to the supreme court’s order on Tuesday, two lower courts had separately sided with the immigrants."

US supreme court allows Trump officials to resume deportations to third countries | US supreme court | The Guardian

The Day of Reckoning Is Coming | Steve Schmidt

 

The Day of Reckoning Is Coming | Steve Schmidt

Andrew Bailey, a Deputy Director at the F.B.I., Leaves His Job - The New York Times

Andrew Bailey, a Deputy Director at the F.B.I., Leaves His Job

Mr. Bailey, who was part of a three-person leadership team atop the bureau, lasted barely a year.

Sept. 28, 2026, 10:30 a.m. ET

An internal F.B.I. email indicated that Andrew Bailey was departing from his role for family reasons.Mike Stewart/Associated Press

Andrew Bailey, who has served as deputy director of the F.B.I. as part of an unusual leadership arrangement, is leaving the job after a little more than a year, the second such departure amid the turbulence in federal law enforcement agencies under the Trump administration.

An internal F.B.I. email indicated Mr. Bailey was stepping down for family reasons, according to people familiar with the decision who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a move that was not yet public. In recent months, people familiar with the inner workings of the agency have described the arrangement between Kash Patel, the director, and his two deputy directors — Mr. Bailey and Christopher Raia, a longtime F.B.I. agent and manager — as rocky.

Mr. Patel and Mr. Bailey did not get along, and often went long stretches without speaking to each other, according to multiple people familiar with their interactions who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

For decades, the bureau has operated with a single deputy director, a career F.B.I. official overseeing daily operations and reporting to the director, who is appointed by the president. But President Trump upended that tradition by naming the right-wing podcaster Dan Bongino, who had been a Secret Service agent but had no experience at the F.B.I., as the No. 2 to Mr. Patel. In essence, that put two firebrand influencers with scant management experience atop the 35,000-person agency.

Mr. Patel and Mr. Bongino had a sometimes strained relationship with Mr. Trump’s first attorney general, Pam Bondi, whom they blamed for mishandling the release of files related to the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein. She in turn complained about Mr. Patel’s management of the bureau, including his propensity to post premature or inaccurate information about continuing operations.

In August 2025, the Trump administration announced a novel arrangement, saying that Mr. Bailey would come in as a co-deputy director alongside Mr. Bongino. At the time, Mr. Bailey was serving as the attorney general in Missouri, a post he had used to pursue Republican lawsuits pursuing culture-war issues.

Many agents inside the bureau believed that Ms. Bondi, herself a former Republican state attorney general, had brought in someone to serve as director in waiting if Mr. Trump ever tired of Mr. Patel. But Mr. Trump fired Ms. Bondi in April, and Mr. Patel outlasted Mr. Bailey.

In the interim, Mr. Patel had sidelined him, and Mr. Bailey left little imprint from his year at the bureau. His appearance when the F.B.I. executed a warrant to see 2020 ballots from Fulton County, Ga., was notable not just because of the legal and political dispute over the inquiry — an effort to press on with Mr. Trump’s baseless rigged election claims — but because it was extraordinarily rare for Mr. Bailey to play a visible role in any operation.

Alan Feuer is a reporter for The Times who covers the effects President Trump has had on the courts, the Justice Department and the broader rule of law.

Glenn Thrush covers the Department of Justice for The Times and has also written about gun violence, civil rights and conditions in the country’s jails and prisons.

Charlie Savage writes about national security and legal policy for The Times.

Andrew Bailey, a Deputy Director at the F.B.I., Leaves His Job - The New York Times

Bill Gates Changes His Mind on AI

 

"Make America Great Again" means segregation

 

 

White House Blocks CNN From Air Force One

​

 Summary

“The White House blocked CNN from a Saturday trip to Tennessee after a court order restored access following a ban. The TV pool had boycotted coverage but resumed after CNN filmed an event with Xi Jinping.

​

CNN won’t be able to join President Trump on a Saturday trip to Tennessee. He had banned CNN and two other news outlets from the White House, but a court order on Thursday restored their access.

Published Sept. 25, 2026Updated Sept. 26, 2026, 10:16 a.m. ET

The decision immediately raised the question of whether the television pool would cover the president’s trip.Pete Marovich for The New York Times

The White House on Friday night blocked CNN from accompanying President Trump on a Saturday trip to Tennessee, a network spokeswoman confirmed, in the latest twist in a weeklong standoff between Mr. Trump and the Washington press corps.

The decision immediately raised the question of whether the television pool would cover the president’s trip. The TV pool, a rotating group of networks that share the work of filming the president’s daily activities, had boycotted those responsibilities this week after Mr. Trump first banned CNN from participating in the pool.

In a Friday night email detailing logistics for the Saturday trip, the White House did not list a primary television pool representative. The White House did not return a request for comment.

In a post on Truth Social on Saturday morning, Mr. Trump continued to argue for banning the media from the White House. “Fake news should not be allowed in the White House!!! It has gone on far too long."

The tumult in White House coverage began a week ago, when Mr. Trump announced he would ban CNN, MS NOW and Politico in a social media post. Journalists for the outlets were denied access to White House grounds on Saturday. By Monday, the outlets had challenged the ban with a lawsuit in federal court.

Other news organizations made adjustments to their White House coverage in a show of solidarity with the banned news outlets. The TV pool suspended its work while CNN was banned from White House grounds, declining to film most of Mr. Trump’s visit this week with the Chinese leader, Xi Jinping.

On Thursday, a federal judge ordered the White House to restore the journalists’ credentials “immediately.” And on Friday, the White House let CNN film Mr. Trump and Mr. Xi during an event at the National Archives in Washington. When it did, the TV pool resumed its coverage.

The media outlets’ lawsuit requested that the White House restore the level of access that they had before Mr. Trump’s ban. The judge’s order directed the White House to reinstate the journalists’ hard passes to enter the White House complex but didn’t explicitly address their pool rotations.

In a Thursday interview with CNN, Theodore J. Boutrous, a lawyer for the media outlets, said he believed the order required the White House to restore their pool assignments“

 

Zombified’ C.D.C., Hobbled by Cuts, Struggles to Fulfill Scientific Mission

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 Summary

“Staff at the C.D.C. fell 30 percent by May 2026, leaving only one of 11 directors. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and associates control operations, hindering outbreak response and guidance. Political appointees redirected work, including autism research and screwworm tasks.

​

The agency has lost its independence and nearly a third of its staff, as Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and associates have tightened control.

Sept. 26, 2026Updated 9:09 a.m. ET

A protest outside the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention last year after employees were laid off. Beyond staff reductions, the agency also faces a leadership vacuum.Elijah Nouvelage/Getty Images

For decades, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was the undisputed global leader in public health. Its scientists helped train health officials worldwide. In the United States, it was the primary source of guidance for prevention and treatment of diseases, including diabetes, H.I.V. and the seasonal flu.

But after a year and a half in the cross hairs of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s drive to remake public health policy, the agency is a skeleton of the powerhouse it was.

The Trump administration’s widespread layoffs in early 2025 cut 18 percent of the C.D.C.’s staff. But new personnel data, compiled by a group of former federal scientists and reported here for the first time, indicate that the agency’s staff has dwindled far more, as large numbers of employees retired or resigned. As of May 2026, the C.D.C. had 30 percent fewer employees than it did before the layoffs, the data show.

Interviews with more than 30 current and former employees reveal the agency is now tightly controlled by Mr. Kennedy and his associates, and its scientists are finding it increasingly difficult to do their jobs effectively. (Some of them spoke on the condition of anonymity because of a fear of retaliation from the administration.)

The number of C.D.C. employees has fallen sharply in one year

March 2025 9,279 staff

Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious DiseasesImmunization and Respiratory DiseasesGlobal HealthHIV, Viral Hepatitis, STD, and TB PreventionOccupational Safety and HealthChronic DiseaseInjury Prevention and ControlPublic Health Infrastructure

May 2026 6,683 staff

Nearly a third of C.D.C. employees are gone

–17%–16%–28%–27%–30%–48%–43%–36%–19%–20%

National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion

March 2025 968 staff

May 2026 501 staff

Total loss –48%

The changes have hindered the C.D.C.’s ability to respond to outbreaks as measles spreads at home and Ebola abroad, and to issue timely guidance on vaccinations as cooling temperatures kick off the respiratory season, according to current and former employees. State and local health departments, which rely on the C.D.C. for resources and technical advice, have been stymied by delays. Entire divisions have been shuttered, including teams that worked on smoking, sexual violence, child abuse and falls among older adults.

Even some areas central to the Trump administration’s priorities have been gutted. Despite Mr. Kennedy’s focus on chronic diseases and autism, the C.D.C. centers that aim to prevent chronic diseases and birth defects are at half their previous size, according to the new data, compiled by the Public Data Observatory from the Office of Personnel Management, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the employee union.

The layoffs spared the agency’s infectious disease centers. But even so, the center for emerging and zoonotic diseases, which manages Ebola and hantavirus, among others, now has nearly 300 fewer employees than in March 2025, and the respiratory disease center has lost nearly 200 — about 17 percent in each case.

Beyond staff reductions, there is a leadership vacuum. Only one of the 11 center directors from March 2025 remains at the agency. Most of the other centers are being run by acting directors, some of whom were elevated from jobs one or two levels below.

“It’s a zombified C.D.C. where you have all the bits and pieces — like the body’s there, the substance is there, but it’s not acting like how an agency like that should act,” said Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, who led the respiratory disease center before he resigned in August 2025.

Despite a series of high-profile disease outbreaks, C.D.C. workers have had little contact with the World Health Organization, with members of Congress and even, for a time, with their partners in state and local health departments, some employees said. Statements to the media about health crises are also tightly controlled by H.H.S.

Even basic functions have broken down. Travel approvals take months; upkeep of bathrooms and vacuuming of offices have been disrupted, some current employees said.

One senior official said it felt as though the agency was being held together with bubble gum and duct tape, with employees running from crisis to crisis, and nothing working the way it is supposed to.

The Department of Health and Human Services did not respond to a series of questions about the C.D.C.’s work, staffing and independence. “C.D.C. continues to protect the health and safety of the American people and communicate clearly about the importance of vaccination,” the department said in an emailed statement.

But several former officials disagreed with that assessment, noting that the C.D.C. has offered little leadership or clear communication even as, in just a few months, the nation has grappled with record cases of measles, cyclosporiasis and rabies.

“Imagine losing a third of a city’s firefighters and then wondering why downtown is burning,” said Dr. Jonathan Mermin, who led the agency’s center for H.I.V. and sexually transmitted infections till April 2025, and is now the dean of the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health.

Political Interference

From the very first day of Mr. Trump’s second term, when he withdrew the country from the W.H.O., his administration has sought to upend the nation’s health policies and align them with his political priorities.

In past administrations, just two or three political appointees had purview over the C.D.C. Now, there are nearly 20 political appointees from H.H.S. who communicate with C.D.C. staff members, sometimes directing them to spend time and funding on dubious theories outside the agency’s scope, according to several officials.

Last year, an H.H.S. official directed the C.D.C. to award a no-bid contract — a rarity for the agency — to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute to explore whether immunizing pregnant women would lead to autism in their children, a theory that Mr. Kennedy has espoused but that has been debunked by numerous studies. To pay for the research, the C.D.C. took $362,000 from a program that provides free vaccines to about half of American children.

In an email viewed by The New York Times, Stuart Burns, a political appointee, asked C.D.C. employees to pull together details of every measles case since 2010, including patients’ underlying medical conditions with diagnostic codes; that information is not collected routinely, they told him. Mr. Kennedy has falsely argued that measles only causes death in children who are already ill with other conditions.

Dr. William “Reyn” Archer III, another appointee who previously oversaw the C.D.C., repeatedly asked agency employees to work on screwworm, a disease that mostly affects cattle, even though the C.D.C.’s mission is to protect human health, said Dr. Daniel Jernigan, who headed the agency’s emerging disease center before resigning in August 2025. Dr. Archer did not respond to a request for comment.

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Mr. Kennedy’s associates outside the administration have also been allowed direct access to senior C.D.C. staff members. Dr. Ben Edwards, a physician in Lubbock, Texas, who treated children while he was infected with measles and whom Mr. Kennedy had praised as an “extraordinary” healer, asked senior C.D.C. officials to look into cod liver oil as a treatment for measles, citing “historical references dating back to the 1700s,” in an email viewed by The Times.

“We just would have to run around constantly to be responsive to all of these strange asks,” recalled Dr. Daskalakis, the former head of the respiratory disease center.

Numerous other instances of political interference in the C.D.C.’s activities have already been reported. Most notably, Mr. Kennedy openly overruled the C.D.C.’s scientists in imposing strict quarantine measures for people exposed to hantavirus. Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, who led the agency for six months in the absence of a Senate-confirmed director, squashed publication of a study on the effectiveness of Covid vaccines.

Some observers had hoped the C.D.C.’s new director, Dr. Erica Schwartz, a physician who has pledged to “follow the science,” would provide a bulwark against political interference. But one month into the job, she has made no public statements about the importance of childhood vaccines or corrected misinformation from her boss, Mr. Kennedy. In one of her first big decisions, she ordered agency employees to challenge Pennsylvania’s announcement of two measles deaths, shunning standard procedure.

In its statement, H.H.S. said, “Dr. Schwartz and C.D.C.’s new leadership are evaluating the agency’s structure and operations to ensure C.D.C. can effectively advance the priorities of President Trump and Secretary Kennedy and fulfill its core public health mission.”

Delays and Dysfunction

Across the C.D.C., the employees who remain are backfilling roles left vacant. 

“I’ve never seen such a plethora of acting roles in my life,” the agency’s new chief operating officer, Sean Slovenski, acknowledged to staff members at a meeting in June, a recording of which was obtained by The Times.

Many divisions are struggling to disburse money appropriated by Congress. In an email in May viewed by The Times, an official asked for volunteers from other offices to help the Division of Population Health, which had lost 88 percent of its staff, write notices of funding opportunities for diseases like lupus and epilepsy.

“We are overseeing millions of dollars in funded work, but how can we do this in a responsible way when we just don’t have enough people to really oversee the work well?” said one official at the agency’s chronic disease center.

The agency’s dysfunction is alarming public health experts even outside the country, who had long relied on the C.D.C.’s expertise during global crises. At a recent meeting of global flu experts, Dr. Jernigan said, “people truly believe that we are less prepared now and less capable of having a coordinated response than we were before the pandemic.”

By this time of year in 2024, the C.D.C. had published detailed recommendations for vaccines against respiratory diseases, with endorsements from the director at the time, Dr. Mandy Cohen, and notes from a meeting of its vaccine advisers.

But because of a federal court ruling, the C.D.C.’s vaccine advisers have not met since December, and the agency has not issued updated recommendations for the vaccines. Some employees at the agency wanted to post clear recommendations for flu vaccines, but did not want to get into a conflict with political appointees, Dr. Jernigan said.

After controversy erupted over the Covid vaccine study, Dr. Bhattacharya demoted the previous acting director of the respiratory disease center, Dr. Brandi Limbago, and replaced her with Rebecca Greco Koné, an operational leader who is not a scientist.

The lack of experienced staff members is also affecting one of the C.D.C.’s primary functions: helping state and local governments.

The C.D.C.’s public health infrastructure grant, which helps health departments train employees and build systems, was managed by 20 project officers but it now has just three. As a result, the team’s response time for requests from local departments has increased from less than a day to more than 10, and some requests have been missed entirely. One county health department requested help on Aug. 7 with submitting data for its annual report but as of Sept. 21, the request was unanswered.

“We’re seeing a movement away from clinical guidance, from data, and from working with states,” said Dr. Debra Houry, who was the agency’s chief medical officer before resigning in August 2025.

In all, more than 1,200 people retired between March 2025 and May 2026, nearly four times the number in the comparable period in 2023-24. About 270 people are still on administrative leave, being paid but not working, while a lawsuit challenging the layoffs makes its way through the courts.

Aaron Sussell, an epidemiologist in the agency’s office in Spokane, Wash., who studied the health of miners, was placed on administrative leave in April 2025. He and his colleagues were suddenly recalled to work in January with 24 hours’ notice but by then, some had moved out of state and others had taken jobs outside the government.

Dr. Sussell, who worked at the C.D.C. for 37 years, decided to retire at the end of February. He would normally have trained his replacement. Instead, he saw an ad for his job go up five months after he left, then get taken down. His position remains unfilled.

The agency’s global health center was approved to fill 18 critical positions. Officials posted ads, interviewed candidates and made job offers to some. But the offers expired before H.H.S. completed the next steps like background checks, so they had to start the interview process all over again, according to an official with knowledge of the situation.

By law, C.D.C. employees who were laid off have priority to be rehired, but some applicants were told they were ineligible for the very jobs they had previously held for years. In all, the agency hired 108 employees between March 2025 and May 2026, compared with more than 1,500 between March 2023 and May 2024.

The staffing totals do not always tell the full story. One C.D.C. branch that works on vaccine-preventable diseases, such as measles, has lost only seven of its 50 people. But they include the four most experienced scientists from the measles lab team, which is trying to analyze genetic material that will determine whether the United States can still claim to have eliminated measles. And funding cuts to other federal agencies have also affected the C.D.C.’s budget for fighting infectious diseases: The budget for a branch that tackles Ebola and other deadly diseases has dropped by 36 percent.

Some C.D.C. scientists are hesitant to sign up for the Ebola response in the Democratic Republic of Congo because they disagree with the administration’s focus on keeping infected people out of the country rather than on helping to contain the outbreak.

Others are too overburdened to help. About 100 C.D.C. staff members have been deployed to Congo to help with the outbreak, compared with about 2,000 who went to West African countries during the 2014 Ebola outbreak.

“If you’re doing your job and your boss’s job who left, and you also have three staff people who left under you,” said Dr. Fiona Havers, who resigned from the C.D.C. in June 2025, “no one has the spare capacity to help out in something that’s not in their field.”

1. 

   Apoorva Mandavilli

   Global health reporter

   For more than a year, it’s been obvious that the C.D.C. is in distress. It’s gone through a devastating round of layoffs, was attacked by a gunman and has lost its director and other senior leaders. I’ve covered many of these developments, but I was still shocked when I dug deeper for this story.

   1. 

      Apoorva Mandavilli

      Global health reporter

      Recent numbers show that the agency has lost about a third of its staff altogether, while Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and others he has appointed have stripped it of much of its independence. The employees still at the C.D.C. are doing their best to hold things together, but as one put it, they’re "running out of fingers and toes to plug holes" in a sinking ship.

Apoorva Mandavilli reports on science and global health for The Times, with a focus on infectious diseases and pandemics and the public health agencies that try to manage them.“

BOMBSHELL: Supreme Court UPENDS election with SHOCK RULING

 

The Oligarchs are Evil, Venal and Dumb as Hell

 

  

Unused Tents and Uneaten Food: Watchdog Finds ‘Waste’ in Immigration Crackdown

​

​

“In a report Thursday, the Government Accountability Office said the Trump administration squandered millions of dollars to expand detention.

Sept. 24, 2026

U.S. Immigration Crackdown

U.S. forces erected a tent city at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, to house migrants. Doug Mills/The New York Times

The Trump administration wasted millions of dollars in its swift effort to drastically expand immigration detention, including nearly $3 million on tents to house migrants at Guantánamo Bay that were never used, according to a review by the Government Accountability Office released on Thursday.

The camp in Cuba, planned near the prison that held suspected terrorists in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, was built to hold 5,000 detainees. As of June, the average daily population of detainees there was 16, G.A.O. said.

The administration also spent $20.5 million on administrative costs and utilities on the seven warehouses the government purchased in haste and later decided to sell. And it squandered $7.1 million for food it did not need at one of its new detention camps in Texas, the review found.

Neither ICE nor the Homeland Security Department responded to a request for comment.

The report is the latest indictment of the spending spree by federal officials to follow through on President Trump’s pledge to detain and deport record numbers of immigrants. Officials have poured billions of dollars into hiring immigration enforcement officers, purchasing unused warehouses to convert into detention centers and expanding other enforcement operations.

As a result, immigrant arrests have reached record levels and illegal border crossings have come to a halt. The spending blitz has also drawn scrutiny from critics and watchdogs.

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Immigration and Customs Enforcement launched six major expansion efforts without a strategic plan in place and has since scaled back four of them, the G.A.O. said. As of July of this year, ICE spent more than $2.5 billion on warehouses and other facilities to house detainees but did not assess the long term costs, the congressional watchdog said.

In its report, the G.A.O. recommended that ICE develop a broad strategic plan to advise its detention expansion efforts with stated goals and budgets. ICE concurred.

The report included several costly, high-profile efforts by the Trump administration to expand detention that were ultimately scrapped that G.A.O. considered wasteful.

• In one of its earliest efforts, the Trump administration planned to house 30,000 immigration detainees on the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base. The Defense Department spent $2.85 million to build tents to house 5,000 migrants, but the shelters did not meet federal detention standards and as a result were never used. Ultimately, the plan was scrapped. As of June, the average daily population of detainees there was 16.

• ICE also partnered with the Defense Department to use military camps to house detainees, including one on an Army base in El Paso, Texas, called Camp East Montana. The government wasted $11.5 million on detainee services over a two-week period when the facility was empty. The camp was built to hold 5,000 detainees, but had about 1,600 as of February of this year. Between October and March, ICE spent $7.1 million on meals it did not need.

• After purchasing 11 warehouses for $1 billion to hold detainees, ICE decided to sell seven of them. To break even, the government must sell the seven warehouses for exactly what it paid for them: $707 million. And in the process of purchasing the seven warehouses it no longer wants, ICE spent $7.7 million in sunk costs for zoning assessments and title insurance as well as $12.8 million on utilities and security for the buildings even though they are not in use.

• To add even more detention space, ICE housed migrants at a now-shuttered Florida facility called Alligator Alcatraz. ICE typically enters into formal agreements with state and local agencies to house detainees. But that was not the case for the Florida detention center, and the Department of Homeland Security reimbursed the state through a grant that includes payments of $249 for each detainee bed, which is nearly three times more than what ICE has been paying on average this year.

“Remember when Donald Trump promised to get rid of ‘waste, fraud, and abuse’ in Washington? Well, G.A.O. now has exposed a shocking pattern of waste within the administration’s unconscionable mass deportation campaign,” Senator Dick Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, said in a statement on Thursday. Mr. Durbin, the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, and two other Democratic senators asked the G.A.O. to investigate the costs of the detention expansion efforts.

Eileen Sullivan is a Times reporter covering the changes to the federal work force under the Trump administration.“