When you go to the website of GEO Group, the largest and most well-connected of the private prison companies, the headline that greets you on the home page reads: “Global Leader in Evidence-Based Rehabilitation.”
If you were to go no further than that home page, you might think the company, based in Boca Raton, was all about “enhanced rehabilitation and reentry programs,” which is just one part of their “Continuum of Care,” a program they trademarked. The word ‘prisoner’ never appears.
It’s not till you click on the tab for “GEO Secure Services” that you first encounter the word ‘offender,’ and the euphemisms start to cascade. This is where you’re told about “intake and housing of offenders,” about “secure offender transportation services,” and the “operation and management of approximately 72,000 beds in 54 secure facilities.” Not prisoners, beds.
The website paints a rosy picture of a benevolent company steeped in the art and science of helping repentant souls return happily to society, much the better for their time spent in GEO-owned beds.
The reality is a bit different. A lot of GEO’s beds had been empty since 2021, which is when Joe Biden directed his government not to renew the contracts for privately owned and operated prisons.
Biden’s reasons were many, but they centered on the preponderance of evidence that GEO’s prisons — and others just like them — were little more than for-profit hellholes, designed and built for human exploitation and degradation.
The sheer number of well-documented, well-litigated cases of physical and sexual abuse, forced labor, medical neglect, and other grievous mistreatment probably figured in Biden’s thinking.
The catch here is that Biden’s directives did not include ICE facilities, whose contracts to “process” immigrant detainees continued. Even so, this left GEO with a lot of unused inventory — or “bedspace” — and a bunch of their facilities had to shut down. Regardless, GEO still owned the properties, which were mostly just sitting there in mothballs, waiting for the right mad dictator to come along and refill those beds.
They didn’t have long to wait. When Trump and his ghouls — Stephen Miller, Kristi Noem, Tom Homan — took over, suddenly there wasn’t enough room to house the thousands and thousands of undocumented migrants they wanted to deport, let alone the millions Trump promised his base of imbeciles.
Which meant things were looking up for GEO, and in February, the company was awarded a 15-year contract, worth $1.5 billion, to detain migrants awaiting deportation.
GEO quickly got down to work, either reopening or modifying facilities in Texas, Michigan, and California, but especially at Delaney Hall, a 1,000-bed facility in Newark, New Jersey now being prepared for the exclusive use of ICE.
Delaney Hall is intended as a main hub in the deportation pipeline. A fifteen-minute bus ride from Newark Airport, it’s strategically located near several major highways and rail lines, so it’s relatively easy to transport lots of people in and out.
It’s also sitting in the heart of an immigrant-rich area of the country, including all five boroughs of New York City, home to hundreds of communities from five different continents.
The idea is that ICE’s vans will be able sweep up as many immigrants as they can, whisk them off to Delaney Hall for processing, hold them there a day or two, figure out which country might take them, then get them on that bus to Newark Airport. No muss, no fuss, no lawyers.
It’s better thought-out than most plans attributed to Trump, probably because GEO actually knows what it’s doing, and Miller is promoting them heavily.
The only problem is that everybody — the city of Newark, the state of New Jersey, and most of the population of the wider metro area — has a visceral hatred of anything connected with ICE. So last week, when Newark’s mayor, Ras Baraka, got himself arrested in front of cameras after leading a protest to prevent the reopening of Delaney Hall, it shined a harsh light on the whole ICE-GEO relationship.
That relationship continues to flourish, nonetheless. A ten-fold increase in ICE’s budget is moving through Congress with — you’ll be shocked to hear —Republican-only support.
It’s not known what percentage of that added funding would make its way to GEO, but they seem to have an inside track. Their connections, both in Congress and within ICE, have put them in a position where they can thwart any rival bids and cherry-pick the juiciest contracts.
Their lobbying efforts have been intense, going back decades, and their long connection to Ballard Partners, a high-powered lobbying firm, has brought Pam Bondi, Trump’s pet attorney general, into the conversation around the awarding of these contracts. Bondi used to work at Ballard, and is no stranger to corrupt practices, especially her own.
Still, the new beefed-up ICE funding has not yet passed Congress, and its passage is not a certainty. But whatever chunk of that funding GEO ultimately lands, they are amply equipped to offer a wide range of services to ICE.
Beyond the obvious bricks-and-mortar stuff, these services will undoubtedly include an extension of GEO’s handy immigrant surveillance app, which has proven devastatingly effective at locating migrants when it’s time to deport them.
Apparently, undocumented migrants seeking legal status in the U.S. can avoid detention, just by putting that app on their phones. They are then allowed to move freely — saves beds, you see — but they’re required to check-in several times a day by uploading a selfie to ICE. The geolocations of these selfies make it ridiculously easy to find them when ICE decides to come looking for them in hoodies and masks.
It’s ironic — in a chilling sort of way — that Trump, whose junta has no interest in competence, let alone expertise, is making such a big investment in a company that is truly an expert in its field.
But we shouldn’t be surprised. Alliances between fascist governments and corporate vampires have a long and sordid history. Somehow, whenever there’s a demand for things like surveillance apps and detention facilities — or, for that matter, concentration camps and Zyklon-B — there are always companies like GEO, who are happy to meet it.
What made us think humanity had gotten past this?
“It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words.” George Orwell, 1984.
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