Guaranteed Empty: The Bed Floor in ICE’s Own Arithmetic

A guaranteed minimum is the simplest clause in detention contracting: the government commits to pay for a floor of beds whether or not anyone occupies them. In ICE's own file, that floor is 47,773 beds — and on an average day this fiscal year, 9,971 of them were paid for and empty at the 25 facilities running more than ten percent under their guarantee.

The clause is not hidden. The guaranteed-minimum column ships in the same spreadsheet as the population counts, which is what makes the arithmetic possible: the Detention Ledger subtracts average daily population from the guarantee, facility by facility, and publishes the result. No estimate, no model — two columns of ICE's own file and a minus sign.

The floor is the system

67 of the 208 facilities in the file carry a guaranteed minimum, and they are not the periphery: those 67 facilities held 48,693 people on an average day — 78 percent of everyone in the system. Wherever detention capacity is bought at scale, it is bought with a floor under it. The take-or-pay structure is the financial spine of the network, not an exception to it.

Ten percent under, ten percent over

The misfit runs in both directions. On the underside, 25 facilities ran more than ten percent below their guarantee — the 9,971 paid-empty beds — including single facilities with four-digit gaps between what is guaranteed and who is there. On the overside, 31 facilities ran more than ten percent above their guaranteed floor. The same clause that pays for empty beds in one place understates the population in another; the guarantee describes the contract, not the crowd.

The file does not say why any particular floor was set where it was, and this ledger does not guess — the same discipline that leaves 196 facilities without an operator claim and 61 without an inspection result leaves the pricing rationale where the record leaves it. What the record does establish, in the government's own numbers, is the shape of the deal: a floor covering 78 percent of the detained population, thousands of beds paid for empty on an average day, and dozens of facilities running past their guarantee at the same time.

Check the arithmetic

Every figure here recomputes from two columns of the public file. The per-facility guarantee, population, and the gap between them ship for all 208 facilities in the ledger's keyless JSON — sortable in either direction, no key, no rate limit.

Every figure is computed from the Detention Ledger (FY26 year-to-date per ICE file dated 2026-07-20); keyless JSON at /detention/index.json, CC0, zero personal data. Paid-empty beds are counted only at facilities more than ten percent under their guarantee, per the ledger's published method. Naming rules: data standards.