Geo Group, the largest private prison operator in the U.S., has become one of the Trump administration's most lucrative allies, with their surveillance tools used to track and help detain undocumented migrants, a new report shows.
Geo Group is the maker of a government-issued app used as part of an immigration surveillance program. Over the past decade, the company has also risen to prominence as a result of its digital tools, which include ankle monitors, smart watches and other tracking devices. Those products are now helping President Trump's deportation efforts by providing the whereabouts of unauthorized migrants to Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
No figures have been released about the number of arrests made as a result of the digital monitoring program, but legal aid groups estimated it was at least in the hundreds. More than 30,000 migrants were arrested in Trump's first 50 days in office, according to The New York Times.
The use of Geo Group's technology has made the company one of the Trump administration's big business winners so far, according to a recent New York Times analysis. Even as Trump slashes costs across the federal government, federal agencies have handled Geo Group new contracts to house unauthorized immigrants. And the Department of Homeland Security is weighing the renewal of a longtime contract with the company— worth about $350 million last year— to track roughly 180,000 people now in the surveillance program.
Trump's immigration policies have sent Geo Group's stock price soaring and kept its price afloat even as the stock market plummeted last week. While digital monitoring generates only about 14 percent of its $2.4 billion in annual revenue, the company, which is based in Boca Raton, Fla., has said the amount of migrants it tracks could more than double. Profit margins on the monitoring business hover at around 50 percent.
"The Geo Group was built for this unique moment in our country's history and the opportunities that it will bring," George Zoley, the company's founder, said on an investor call days after Trump was elected.
The tracking program that Geo Group oversees, called Alternatives to Detention, was set up to keep tabs on unauthorized immigrants who face potential deportation. Rather than being placed in detention centers or released into the country without supervision, immigrants receive location tracking devices. They must quickly respond to alerts sent to the gadgets in order to confirm their whereabouts, or risk punishment.
Regardless of the government contracts it has received under the Trump administration, the company has also been heavily criticized for its treatment of detainees in its facilities. According to ProPublica, the company only pays detainees $1 a day for cleaning facilities.
Earlier this year, the company appealed a decision in Washington finding that it should have paid civil detainees in immigration detention facilities minimum wage for doing voluntary work during their confinement. In 2021, a jury said GEO Group owed $17.3 million in back pay for detainees in the facility who had received $1 a day for work performed in the detention center.
Legal aid groups also fear that the company's surveillance tools, which have reportedly helped ICE officers carry out deportations, would soon be used for larger raids. In 2019, during the first Trump administration, agents in Mississippi used data harvested from the company's tools to help secure a warrant for a raid on a chicken processing plant. The sweep, which included workplaces across the state, led to the detention of 680 immigrants.
On the contrary, ICE has been quick to applaud the company's involvement. ICE said in a statement that the monitoring program run by GEO Group "effectively increases court appearance rates and compliance with release conditions." The surveillance tools have helped ICE agents in Georgia track an immigrant to a job site and detain him, while another was grabbed outside a church. More recently, an immigrant in New Jersey received a call from a Geo Group employee asking him to step outside his home because the tracker was not getting signal. Agents were waiting for him outside.
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