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American taxpayers are footing a bill of more than $1.2 million a day for empty immigration jail beds, a PunchUp analysis of ICE’s own new figures reveals.
The breathtaking waste of money is buried in the agency’s FY2026 detention statistics file, quietly posted on July 20 after a three-month publishing blackout that has already triggered at least three lawsuits. The dataset lists each jail’s “guaranteed minimum”—the number of beds the government pays for every night whether anyone sleeps in them or not. At seven facilities alone, roughly 8,200 of those beds are going spare.