The house that ICE built
When a group of men without uniforms arrested Mahmoud Khalil inside his New York City apartment building in March, Khalil’s wife, eight months pregnant, asked them for identification. The men would not give their names or say what agency they worked for. All they said was they were taking Khalil, a legal permanent resident, to an immigrant lockup in downtown Manhattan.
The statement was misleading. Within hours, Khalil was whisked out of the state. He soon found himself in the Central Louisiana ICE Processing Center. The Columbia University graduate student, who had attracted nationwide attention by leading pro-Palestinian protests on campus and was not accused of any crime, spent more than three months imprisoned in the facility.
Central Louisiana is a for-profit detention center, owned and operated by Geo Group, America’s largest private prison company. Geo first opened the facility as a juvenile prison in 1998, but it was shut down a year and a half later after a federal investigation found it was so dangerous that children were mutilating themselves just to get sent to the relative safety of the infirmary. Not wanting its prison inventory to sit idle for long, Geo Group reopened it in 2007 to hold immigrants instead.
Khalil’s imprisonment made him just one of thousands of immigrants who find themselves locked up in a Geo Group facility at any given moment. And George Zoley, the company’s founder and executive chairman, sees them as a once-in-a-lifetime boon to the business he has been building for decades.
“We believe our company faces an unprecedented opportunity at this time,” Zoley told investors in late February. He said his company was holding 15,000 people in detention for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), with plans to expand its capacity to at least 32,000. That would mean more than half a billion dollars in new annual revenue, he said. The normally reserved Zoley, 75, displayed some excitement on the call. He had planned to retire next year, but now those plans were on hold, he said, and he would stay with Geo to see it through its next era. In July, Geo announced a new agreement to keep him as chairman until 2029. (Longtime Geo executive J. David Donahue took over as the company’s CEO at the start of this year.)
Geo Group, founded in 1984 under the name Wackenhut Corrections, operates a sprawling empire that includes some 100 private prisons, immigration detention centers, and residential reentry facilities; electronic surveillance tools; and even ground transportation and flights. On any given day some 350,000 people are being monitored, transported, or held by one of Geo’s entities. And well over a third of its business comes from ICE: In recent decades, Geo has become a key partner in the government’s efforts to detain, monitor, and deport immigrants. Last year, Geo took in about $1 billion from its contracts with ICE, equating to 41% of its annual revenue. The company operated 16 dedicated immigrant detention centers across the country.
The story of how Geo grew into a prison behemoth traces America’s fixation on locking up large numbers of people, from mass incarceration in the 1980s and ’90s to mass deportation more recently. But under the Trump administration, Geo is evolving from a background player in federal enforcement into something closer to a government appendage. With ties to both U.S. attorney general Pam Bondi and “border czar” Tom Homan, Geo now sits at the heart of Trump’s hard-line immigration machine—detaining, monitoring, and even deporting immigrants on a scale unmatched in U.S. history. The company’s profits are driven not just by federal contracts but by nearly free labor that it extracts from the very people it detains. (Neither Zoley nor Geo responded to multiple calls and emails requesting comment for this article. When I approached the company’s headquarters in Boca Raton, Florida, to seek an interview, I was told to leave.)
The week after Donald Trump’s reelection, Geo’s stock shot up 65%, and in the first six months of the new administration, the company announced contracts to reopen three prisons it had previously shuttered, with space to hold more than 4,500 additional immigrants. Geo expects each to bring in between $60 million and $85 million every year—a total of more than $210 million in annual revenue for the company.
With the passage of the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill in July, ICE’s budget—previously around $8 billion a year—skyrocketed. The agency is earmarked to receive an additional $75 billion through 2029, including $45 billion for detention facilities, which could double the number of people it can hold, and $30 billion for arrest and removal efforts. That’s a 300% increase over its existing budget for detention, “an unprecedented increase in ICE’s budget authority,” says Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, senior fellow at the American Immigration Council. And Geo, which already provides more than a third of ICE’s detention beds, stands to benefit handsomely, along with its chairman.
Zoley himself is an immigrant who came to the United States as a child. But his own history does not appear to have translated into a more humane experience for people in his prisons, where lack of adequate food, healthcare, and staffing are frequent complaints. Immigrants inside Geo’s Central Louisiana detention center, where Khalil was held, are “treated like cattle, thrown into a room with 70 other people,” says Nora Ahmed, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Louisiana and one of Khalil’s lawyers. They’re kept “freezing cold,” and increasingly, “people are starving because they are frequently not given enough to eat,” she says. “This is not a humane place to live.”
On the day in June when Khalil was released from the detention center on bail, he stood outside the gate and described his experience inside. “The moment you enter this facility, your rights leave you behind,” he said. “So once you enter there, you see a different reality—just a different reality about this country that supposedly champions human rights and liberty and justice.”
Geo, From Coast to Coast: A look at Geo Group’s holdings across the country
Born in Florina, Greece, Zoley arrived in America in 1953 when he was 3 years old, traveling with his brother and mother, who was already an American citizen. They reunited with Zoley’s father, a bartender, who had made the journey a few years earlier, and soon applied for citizenship. The family moved to Akron, Ohio, where Zoley has said that he learned English.
Though Zoley doesn’t speak much about his background, he brought up his childhood while testifying before Congress in 2020 on ICE detention facilities during the COVID-19 outbreak. In his remarks, he explained that he was born in a house with no plumbing or electricity. When the family immigrated to the United States, he said, “we traveled by ship, landing in New York City.” And Zoley has maintained his Greek roots. He and his wife, Donna, have been involved in the Greek Orthodox church near their Boca Raton home and in a nonprofit that broadcasts Greek Orthodox programming.
But in his congressional testimony, he was quick to distinguish his own immigrant past from the undocumented immigrants in his detention centers. He made clear: “My family received approval to immigrate to the United States.”
Zoley didn’t set out to become a jailer of other immigrants. After getting a PhD in public administration from Florida’s Nova University and working in several low-level local government jobs in the state, he joined the private security firm Wackenhut Corp. in 1981 as its manager of local government privatization. Zoley traveled around the country trying to convince small towns to do away with their public firefighters and hire Wackenhut to run fire services instead.
It didn’t go well. In one episode, he promised to save Dover, New Hampshire more than $100,000 a year by reducing the number of firefighters it employed and instituting 56-hour workweeks for those who remained, substantially cutting back overtime. Although the city council approved a contract with Wackenhut in 1983, a community group rallied opposition, fearing understaffing and less responsive service. Later that year, residents amended the city charter to prohibit privatizing fire services, and most of the councilmembers who approved the contract were soon voted out of office.
By the mid-’80s, however, a new business opportunity was emerging. With the “war on drugs” ramping up, the crack epidemic spreading, and states imposing ever longer sentences, jails and prisons across the country were running out of room. State and federal authorities began looking to private companies to help fill the gap. Wackenhut soon became one of the biggest private operators of jails and prisons. Its prison division’s first contract, in 1987, was a deal with federal immigration authorities to operate the Aurora Processing Center detention facility in Colorado.
After that, things moved quickly. Zoley landed new contracts for jails, prisons, and detention centers, and by 1988, the company’s prospects looked so strong that Wackenhut’s prison division was incorporated as a subsidiary, Wackenhut Corrections Corp., with Zoley as its president. When the prison business went public in 1994 and Zoley was named CEO, it operated nearly 14,000 beds and reported 120% growth from the year before.
In 2000, there were signs that the prison population numbers were flatlining; some places reported a glut in prison beds. But Wackenhut’s immigration detention business kept it going. A 1996 law had vastly expanded the circumstances that could cause an immigrant to be deported, adding new categories of crimes, including nonviolent offenses, that could lead to deportation. It created “a surge in demand for immigration detention facilities,” according to Lauren-Brooke Eisen, a senior fellow at the Brennan Center, in her book Inside Private Prisons.
Detentions rose even faster after the Department of Homeland Security opened its doors in 2003, the same year that Wackenhut Corrections changed its name to Geo Group. Congress budgeted money for tens of thousands more detention beds. Geo and its main competitor, CoreCivic, were ready to cash in on the new federal funding. The private prison industry “has been rescued by immigration detention policies over and over and over,” says Bianca Tylek, executive director of Worth Rises, a group that advocates for eliminating private prisons. As demand for Geo’s criminal incarceration declined, “it was federal detention contracts that rescued” the company, she says.
Unlike typical jails and prisons, which hold people who are accused or convicted of crimes, immigrant detention centers hold people while they wait for resolution of their immigration cases. Since immigration violations are generally civil infractions, not criminal, immigration detention is not supposed to be a punishment—even though it often feels like it is.
“Who in their right mind thinks being in jail is not punishment?” says the ACLU’s Ahmed. “Just the specter of people being behind bars makes the public think they did bad things, but that generally couldn’t be further from the truth.” Even so, many immigrant detention centers are indistinguishable from prisons, and the experience inside is largely the same. “A jail is a jail is a jail,” Ahmed says.
Once inside, immigrant detainees—some of them recently swept up in workplace raids—often find themselves with a new job, one that pays as little as $1 a day, or sometimes nothing at all. Geo has made a practice of using immigrant prisoners to do much of its maintenance, janitorial, food preparation, and laundry work, in what critics say amounts to a perverse form of forced labor: Immigrants who are accused of stealing work from American citizens may end up doing similar work after ICE arrests them—but now to benefit their jailer’s bottom line.
“A substantial contributor to the profits of Geo is the low wages of the people they are able to exploit while in Geo’s custody,” says Jacqueline Stevens, a professor at Northwestern University and founder of its Deportation Research Clinic. A federal appeals court agreed, concluding in a recent decision that by paying the immigrants $1 a day at its Tacoma, Washington, center, “Geo operated its facility with just a handful of full-time staff hired from the local area, thereby saving millions of dollars that it would otherwise have spent on payroll.”
Geo is facing a swell of lawsuits across several states that allege the company violates state minimum wage laws and a federal statute that prohibits forced labor. In one case—a class action brought by people held in Geo’s Aurora, Colorado, immigration detention center—the plaintiffs claim that Geo required prisoners to clean communal areas of the prison for free. (Those who agreed to do other kinds of work, like in the laundry room, were paid $1 a day.) Prisoners who refused were threatened with solitary confinement. One plaintiff, Hugo Hernandez-Ceren, testified that when he saw people come back from solitary, “They had lost a lot of weight. They wouldn’t talk to other people anymore. They seemed afraid. They—they became antisocial.” With that kind of leverage, Geo can force the prisoners to do almost anything, the plaintiffs say.
In addition to denying it has done anything wrong, Geo claims it is immune from lawsuits—as a government contractor, it says it enjoys sovereign immunity just like the government does. Earlier this year, it asked the Supreme Court to decide a procedural issue in the Aurora case: After the trial court denied its sovereign immunity claim, at what stage in the proceedings can the company appeal the denial? This question is so important, Geo argued, that if the high court declined to hear the case, it would allow “activists to frustrate federal immigration enforcement.” In June, the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case in its next term, which starts in October.
The prisoners in the Aurora case make other allegations, too, including that Geo does not provide enough food or toiletries—and that the food it does offer can be sickening. “The food was very awful. People got sick in groups lots of times,” another plaintiff in the case, Alejandro Menocal, said in testimony. “We would complain and nothing would really change.”
Allegations about dangerous food, inadequate healthcare, and insufficient staffing have cropped up again and again in lawsuits against the company over the years. In a 2019 investigation of a different Geo facility, the Department of Homeland Security found “egregious” food safety issues, including chicken that it said “smelled foul,” expired food and unlabeled meat. And Geo’s “grossly inadequate staffing” was a key contributor to “systematic, egregious, and dangerous practices” that the Justice Department found in 2012 at a juvenile prison that Geo operated in Mississippi. The government concluded that management was “deliberately indifferent to staff sexual misconduct” with the prisoners—who were boys and men aged 13 to 22—and staff often used “excessive force as a first response, not as a last resort.” A federal judge that year called Geo’s prison “a cesspool of unconstitutional and inhuman acts and conditions.” While the prison had been operated by another firm for most of its history, the Department of Justice said conditions did not improve after Geo merged with the firm and took over operations. “Key personnel, policies, and training” at the prison “did not change substantially, despite Geo’s claim that it made corrective reforms to reflect the Geo philosophy,” the report stated.
“Widespread understaffing” has long been a problem for Geo and the rest of the prison industry, says Reichlin-Melnick of the American Immigration Council. It’s “a very significant bottleneck for any expansion of immigrant detention,” he says, because companies like Geo find it so difficult to fully staff their prisons—or, potentially, favor fewer staff for business reasons.
Inadequate food and staffing may have led to one of Geo’s most embarrassing recent incidents. A month after it opened an immigrant detention center in Newark, New Jersey, called Delaney Hall, four detainees escaped, apparently by kicking through a wall. The escapes occurred while other detainees were protesting over food. Kathy O’Leary, of the Catholic advocacy group Pax Christi New Jersey and a leading opponent of Delaney Hall, said she heard that on the night of the escape, prisoners were given only slices of bread after not being fed for 20 hours. Geo “couldn’t figure out how to run things properly so people could be fed at a regular time,” she says. The escapees were eventually recaptured, and Geo continues operating Delaney Hall despite calls for its closure.
In the face of its critics, Geo maintains that it treats its prisoners humanely and fully complies with the terms of its government contracts. To the extent that any criticism is warranted, according to Geo and its supporters, it should be directed at the government, not the company. “You’re a business that’s fulfilling a need—a need created by politicians,” says Joe Gomes, a senior research analyst at Noble Capital Markets who follows the company, echoing the arguments of Geo’s supporters. “You don’t make the laws. You don’t detain the people. What you provide are beds.”
Geo doesn’t just provide beds, though. It handles nearly every step in an immigrant’s deportation process, from being held in a detention facility and released subject to electronic surveillance to finally being removed from the country.
Geo’s subsidiary Geo Transport operates a fleet of vans, buses, and airplanes for the “armed, secure transportation” of prisoners and immigrants, both within the U.S. and internationally. It takes prisoners to court dates and, for immigrants, carries out flights to other countries. It’s an area Geo thinks will grow significantly with the rise in deportation flights under Trump, Zoley told investors earlier this year. The company expects between $40 million and $50 million more in annual revenue from flights it conducts for ICE.
Through another subsidiary, BI Incorporated, Geo provides electronic surveillance of people who are not locked up but whom the government wants to track—those on parole or immigrants awaiting a final deportation decision. They may be required to wear a GPS monitoring device or regularly check in on an app, all powered by Geo. (At press time, the company’s five-year, $2.2 billion contract to provide these services for ICE was set to expire at the end of August, though Geo expected an extension.)
Geo’s electronic monitoring is “a huge opportunity,” says Gomes. He explains that monitoring generates higher profit margins than detention. And with millions of immigrants who are potentially deportable but not held in detention, Geo could vastly expand its monitoring—and its profits. In the first quarter of the year, Geo was monitoring an average of 186,000 people a day. But, as Zoley pointed out in his second-quarter call with investors in August, there are as many as 8 million people in the immigration system who are not detained and another 10 million who are not in the system at all—all of them potential future surveillance subjects.
Geo’s critics warn that the expansion of electronic surveillance only increases the number of people caught up in the private prison industry. Authorities “have deployed it to widen the detention net,” says Tylek of Worth Rises. “I look at electronic monitoring as incarceration 2.0.”
Geo’s monitoring app, which some immigrants are required to keep on their phones, also gives ICE new opportunities to quickly detain people. In June, some immigrants in New York City began receiving urgent messages on their Geo apps telling them, “Your ICE official has asked that you present yourself in the office to review your case this week”—but when they arrived, ICE arrested them, according to the New York news outlet The City.
Zoley has kept business flowing by building close ties with politicians. In 1996, he outlined a strategy of keeping his board of directors stocked with well-connected people. “Just by having their names associated with us is all we expect of them,” he told a gathering of securities professionals and reporters. Among the company’s directors at the time were a former U.S. attorney general, a former Illinois governor, and a retired director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons.
Geo is just as connected today. Bondi was a lobbyist for Geo in 2019. The company paid consulting fees to Homan before he joined the administration. Daniel Bible, ICE’s head of enforcement and removal operations during the Biden administration, recently became a Geo executive. And Joe Negron, the company’s general counsel, joined Geo immediately after stepping down as Florida’s Senate president in 2018.
Zoley and the company give huge amounts to politicians. A subsidiary donated $1 million last year to Make America Great Again, a pro-Trump super political action committee (PAC), and another $500,000 to Trump’s inauguration committee. Altogether, groups and individuals associated with Geo gave $3.7 million to politicians and political groups in 2024, according to OpenSecrets—almost all of it going to Trump and other Republicans.
Geo asserts that it doesn’t abuse its political influence. “We have not advocated for or against, nor have we played a role in setting, criminal justice or immigration enforcement policies, such as whether to criminalize behavior, the length of criminal sentences, or the basis for or length of an individual’s incarceration or detention,” the company said in an annual report on its political activity. But its opponents say those claims are misleading. The company might not directly lobby for more detention or longer sentences, but it donates to politicians who promise those policies. “You don’t spend millions of dollars and expect nothing in return,” Tylek says.
Outside of his private prison company, Zoley appears to be the front man and songwriter for a rock band called Akron, which has released two albums, both available on streaming platforms. While Zoley hasn’t acknowledged the band is his, the connections are extensive. The band’s name is trademarked by a Florida company that lists Zoley as its only manager. The band’s songs are credited to “George Christopher”—Zoley’s first and middle names. He grew up in Akron, and the lead singer sounds like him. (Asked about the band, one of Zoley’s brothers told me, “I don’t know what he does in his free time.”)
Most of the songs are about love and loss. But one track, released in 2021, stands out. Called “The Sound,” it references an unnamed injustice and describes “the sound of voices in pain.” The refrain laments that other people are ignoring that pain. But then the singer arrives at a realization: “I could just stand here, and not share the blame. Or I could choose to do what I can. Make it a better place from where I began.”
Zoley, who lives in a $20 million, nine-bed mansion in the exclusive Royal Palm Yacht and Country Club community in Boca Raton, received $6.4 million in total compensation last year. He holds more than $100 million in Geo stock, and he is worth about $300 million, according to an estimate in May by Bloomberg Billionaires Index. His son, son-in-law, brother, and brother-in-law all have worked for or have had lucrative contracts with the company.
Does Zoley feel any qualms about getting rich from the imprisonment of other people? He has never indicated so. To the extent that he responds to criticism at all, he largely blames the media or the nature of the prison industry itself. In a 2000 interview with 60 Minutes about conditions for children in his prisons, Zoley suggested that no one should be surprised about the occasional stomach-churning allegation. “Any correctional organization is subject to numerous allegations of that nature,” he said. “That’s part of the business; it is a tough business. The people in prison are not Sunday school children.”
Working in his “tough business,” Zoley has often said how proud he is of his company. Announcing the reopening of an 1,800-bed immigrant detention center in Georgia this June, he expressed hope that Geo could help lock up even more people. “We stand ready,” he said in a press release, “to continue to help the federal government meet its expanded immigration enforcement priorities.”
