MAGA Inc.: GEO Group

In early May 2025, Ras Baraka, the mayor of Newark, New Jersey, was arrested for attempting to inspect the Delaney Hall detention center in his city. The center is run by GEO Group, a private prison company, on behalf of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency.

(Click here for the table of contents of MAGA Inc.: A Guide to Trump's World of Crypto Czars, Tech Titans and Prison Profiteers.) 

Baraka was challenging GEO Group’s newly awarded 15-year long contract with ICE worth US$1 billion to re-open and expand Delaney Hall in order to detain and hold as many as 1,000 people at a time, despite the fact that the company did not have proper construction permits nor had it conducted legally required safety checks. This February 27, 2025 contract was designed to be the centerpiece of the Trump administration’s plan to arrest and deport hundreds of thousands of migrants.

“The agreement between ICE and the GEO Group to use Delaney Hall with the intention of incarcerating and holding immigrants slated for deportation does not supersede the ordinances and procedures legislated by the City of Newark and the State of New Jersey,” Baraka said in a statement in late March. “It is an opportunity for them to make billions of dollars. It’s not about anything else. It’s about folks making billions of dollars off of the backs of working people, particularly Black and Brown people.”

Furious Trump administration officials backed Baraka’s arrest in May, claiming that his demand to enter and inspect the facility was illegal. “He has willingly chosen to disregard the law. That will not stand in this state. He has been taken into custody. NO ONE IS ABOVE THE LAW,” Alina Habba, interim U.S. Attorney for New Jersey, wrote on X (formerly Twitter).

(The charges against Baraka were dropped a few days after his arrest, and he had the last laugh when Habba was forced to resign in December, after judges ruled that she had been kept illegally in office by Trump.)

Baraka’s arrest – a remarkable action by the Trump administration against a sitting mayor of a major U.S. city – shone a spotlight on the vast expansion of the private prison-industrial complex that has benefited from Trump’s war on migrants. 

GEO Group

Boca Raton, Florida-based GEO Group was founded in 1984 as Wackenhut Corrections Corporation, a division of the Wackenhut Corporation, and renamed a decade later when it became a publicly-traded company.

GEO owns detention centers in 15 U.S. states as well as private prisons and other incarceration facilities in Australia, South Africa and the United Kingdom.

Under the second Trump administration, the company has been awarded multiple contracts to re-open detention centers in addition to Delaney Hall, such as:

•    North Lake Correctional Facility in Baldwin, Michigan (worth US$70 million in annual revenue)
•    Karnes ICE Processing Center in Karnes City, Texas (worth US$79 million in its first year)
•    D. Ray James Facility in Folkston, Georgia (worth US$66 million annually)

BI, a GEO subsidiary, also has a contract to electronically monitor migrants under ICE's Alternatives to Detention program. To do this, the company supplies ankle monitors and "smart" watches as well as tracking software. The company gets paid approximately US$1 every time a migrant uses BI's SmartLink app to take a selfie and US$3 a day to use the VeriWatch smartwatches.

Pro-Palestine Detainees

The company continued to hit news headlines over its support for Trump’s deportation policies in March 2025 when Mahmoud Khalil and Rümeysa Öztürk, two international students who expressed solidarity with Palestine in the wake of the massive Israeli genocide in Gaza, were imprisoned at two different sites operated by the company in Louisiana, as the Trump administration attempted to showcase its desire to clamp down on pro-Palestine university campus protests. 

Both Khalil and Öztürk were eventually released and spoke out against GEO.

“The conditions inside were very dire…. the food is inedible. It was very cold,” Khalil told National Public Radio, about his detention at the LaSalle Detention Center in Jena, Louisiana. “You have no privacy whatsoever, sort of sleeping with over 70 men in the room, and no one explaining to you what’s happening or what will happen.”

“I cannot remember a night when I didn’t go to sleep hungry,”  Khalil told the Associated Press news agency. He said he was denied his ulcer medication and that he dropped 15 pounds (7 kilograms) in body weight.

Öztürk described similar experiences at the South Louisiana ICE Processing Center.
 
"The food in the dining hall was low-quality and unhealthy….[Our] dining experiences left us grappling with digestion issues and persistent stomach aches," Öztürk wrote in an article for Vanity Fair magazine.

“During my 45 days there, I was kept in damp, dusty, overcrowded conditions with poor air and triggers that made my asthma significantly worse. Once, when I suffered a severe asthma attack, the officers did not respond until many women began banging on the windows to get their attention. Afterward, I was not even allowed to take a few minutes of fresh air, being told that it was a risk to the officers’ safety," she added. “Our requests [for medical help] would often go unanswered for weeks—and according to my friends, sometimes even months….From cancer to colds to women’s diseases, ibuprofen was the magical pill the medical staff offered. When I asked questions, they responded that they couldn’t ‘babysit’ me."

Abuse Allegations

Reports about other detainees held at GEO facilities around the country have been grim.

In September 2025, some 475 workers—mostly Korean migrant workers—laboring at the joint Hyundai-LG Energy Solutions battery plant in Ellabell, Georgia were detained by ICE and held at the Folkston ICE Processing Center in Georgia.

“They tied our hands behind our backs like criminals. We had to bend down to drink water from the floor,” Kim Ji-hoon, an electrician who was one of the detainees, told Dong-a Ilbo, a major Korean newspaper. “We were just trying to work and survive,” he added. “No one should be treated like this.” 

“We were kept in a room with almost no light. The bathroom had no doors—just a sheet. We were treated like animals,” Park Min-seo, another detained worker told the same newspaper.

Four detainees filed a formal complaint against GEO’s South Louisiana ICE Processing Center, alleging that company staff were guilty of sexual assault, harassment, forced labor, retaliatory solitary confinement and denial of medical attention.

“Our rights are being violated everyday. This is a privately run facility that profits from our suffering. They are using us to make a profit but denying us medical care, food, even the most basic things like proper clothes and mattresses,” Monica Renteria-Gonzalez, one of the four detainees, said in a statement. “Regardless of our immigration status, at the end of the day we are human beings and we still have rights and feelings and we still matter, even if we are detained.” 

Protests

Protests against the company’s contracts have spread across the U.S.

In June 2025, Michigan residents staged a protest along the M-37 highway against GEO’s plans to reopen the North Lake Correctional Facility. “We don’t want a Michigan where our children grow up in the shadow of the largest ICE detention center in the Midwest,” Maggie Doyle, a volunteer with No Detention Centers in Michigan, told ABC 7 Chicago television.

The following month, approximately 100 demonstrators gathered near GEO’s Boca Raton headquarters to protest ICE’s business ties with the private prison industry. “Detaining people for profit is morally indefensible,” Myra Kremenitzer, founder of grassroots movement Indivisible’s Boca Raton chapter, told WLRN radio. “The GEO Group has built a business model around the suffering of vulnerable individuals, many of whom are fleeing violence, persecution, and poverty. This is not justice—it’s exploitation.”  

In September 2025, activists also rallied in Pennsylvania, calling for the GEO-run Moshannon Valley Processing Center in Philipsburg to be shut down. As detention capacity has increased, so has GEO’s monthly invoices. “Behind every invoice is a real person being separated from their family and locked in a cage,” Bobbi Erickson, an activist with the Shut Down Detention Campaign, a coalition opposed to for-profit prisons, told USA Today newspaper.

Back in New Jersey, protests have only grown in the 12 months since the mayor of Newark was arrested. On May 22, 2026, a group of 300 prisoners went on hunger strike inside Delaney Hall over the living conditions. Hundreds of supporters rallied outside in support - including Mikie Sherrill, the current governor of New Jersey, and Andy Kim, one of the two U.S. senators for New Jersey.

Videos show ICE agents breaking up the protest outside with batons, pepper balls, and pepper spray, even striking the senator.

Similar scenes were reported inside. "We started getting calls from inside that the jail guards, 40 of them, were coming through two of the units, beating people with batons and throwing chemical agent canisters into the hallway," Kathy O'Leary with Pax Christi USA told CBS News.

“The people inside Delaney Hall deserve their day in court and to be treated humanely, not violently. The time is now to shut this broken facility down,” Senator Kim told NJBIZ. “This company, GEO Group, got a billion-dollar contract from ICE to run Delaney Hall. They have one full-time doctor for 800 detainees. They could hire more doctors. That would just be less profit for GEO Group. They could hire and get better food. But that’s just again less profit."

Company Response

The company is proud of the new contracts. “Over the past year, we've captured new growth, making it the most successful period for new business wins in our company's history,” GEO chairman George Zoley told investors on a February 12, 2026 earnings call.

Indeed GEO reported US$707.7 million in revenue in 2025’s fourth quarter, an almost 16.5 percent increase compared to the same time in 2024.