ICE’s biggest facility in Dilley, Texas, can hold 2,400 parents and children — but on June 27 and 28 it was at just 63 percent capacity, with 886 beds empty, the detainee logs showed.

Although the beds were empty, the government was still paying for them.

The contractor who operates Dilley “is paid a flat rate of $3.1 million per month to operate the facility regardless of the number of residents, which means that the government saves no money in reducing the number of families processed at the facility,” Wendi Warren H. Binford, a law professor at Willamette University in Oregon, wrote in a sworn declaration to a federal court two weeks ago.