By Dan Christensen, FloridaBulldog.org
The GEO Group is profiting lavishly in 2026 off the misery of thousands of immigrants who continue to be swept up by the busload into detention centers GEO contracts to run for the Trump administration.
And what makes such profiteering particularly odious is that Geo appears to be obtaining those contracts not merely due to its corporate capabilities, but by participating heartily in the Trump administration’s blatantly corrupt pay to play ethos.
Federal election records reviewed by Florida Bulldog show that company founder, executive chairman and prime mover and shaker George Zoley has led an influence campaign that since the start of the 2024 presidential campaign has funneled more than $5 million to Trump, Trump-affiliated super PACs and Republican allies and their political committees.
In a May 27 letter to the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Acting Director-Designate David Venturella, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-MA noted that GEO’s “rapid expansion” and “immense profit” has “coincided with the Trump Administration’s persistent revolving door and corruption concerns. Numerous high-profile U.S. officials formerly worked for GEO Group.”
“Your career can be characterized as a continuous, decades-long trip in and out of the revolving door between ICE and the private prison industry,” she wrote, noting that Venturella worked for both ICE and GEO before returning to ICE in Feb. 2025. “Border Czar Tom Homan, whose office reportedly played a role in your hiring at ICE, worked as a paid consultant for GEO Group…Mr. Homan reportedly accepted $50,000 cash in a bag in exchange for a promise for future immigration-related contracts.”
President Trump named Venturella Acting Director of ICE on May 12. “Your promotion at ICE to oversee immigration detention centers – after being paid $6 million by GEO Group to run those very centers as a GEO employee – immediately sparked revolving door corruption concerns,” Warren wrote in her May 27 letter.
The Geo Group is ICE’s largest federal customer and according to its 2025 annual report ICE contracts account for 48 percent of its total revenue. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed by President Trump on July 4, 2025, tripled ICE’s annual budget and earmarked $45 billion for new immigration detention centers.
ICE also has large contracts with U.S. Customs and Border Protection [both part of the Department of Homeland Security] and the Justice Department’s U.S. Marshals Service and Federal Bureau of Prisons. GEO’s total revenues for 2025 were $2.6 billion, a solid 8.6 percent increase from the year before. That doubled in the first quarter of 2026 – jumping 17 percent to $705.2 million.
CEO ZOLEY’S EARNINGS GLEE
In what passes for corporate glee, here’s what Zoley had to say while delivering that news during a May 6 earnings call:
“We are very pleased with our first quarter results and improved full year outlook. Our strong performance has been driven by the new growth opportunities we captured in 2025 and are normalizing in 2026. Last year was the most successful period for new business wins in our Company’s history with new or expanded contracts representing up to $520 million in annualized revenues. We expect 2026 to be very active as well and therefore believe that we have upside potential across our diversified business segments.”
According to GEO’s financial reporting, about $300 million of that $520 million is from housing ICE detainees at four previously empty GEO-owned facilities with approximately 6,000 beds in New Jersey, Michigan and Georgia, a “reactivated” ICE processing center in California, plus a renewal contract to manage the Broward Transitional Center. In 2025, Human Rights Watch released a report asserting that it had documented “abusive conditions” at the Pompano Beach facility including “an inhuman intake process, overcrowded cells, unsanitary conditions, inadequate access to basic hygiene, food, medical care, and legal counsel, and physical abuse.”
Still, that’s a fraction of Geo’s total detention capacity globally. GEO’s website says it has 95 secure facilities, processing centers, and community reentry centers with about 75,000 beds. The ACLU, which filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against ICE, said last year that GEO in fact runs 100 global facilities with 81,000 beds.
GEO is raking in tens of millions of additional dollars from providing ICE with secure air and ground transportation services, electronic monitoring equipment and supervision services to 48,000 non-detainees and skip tracing services to track down an individual’s current location.
Less than two weeks after the One Big Beautiful Bill Act became law last year the American Liberty Foundation PAC, (ALF PAC) a hybrid PAC that is affiliated with Trump loyalist Rep. Jim Jordan, R-OH, reported receiving a $250,000 contribution from The Geo Group, Inc. PAC, the company’s affiliated corporate PAC. Jordan chairs the House Judiciary Committee which oversees both the Justice Department and ICE.
But there was a problem. Geo Group’s PAC never reported making the $250,000 contribution on any of its reports to the FEC.
A reporter for the 40-year-old nonprofit Project on Government Oversight asked GEO about the reporting error and was told the PAC hadn’t made the contribution. Instead, the company said it, the GEO Group, contributed the $250,000 from “The GEO Group Inc. Political Contribution Account,” but to a different Jordan-affiliated entity – the American Liberty Action Fund (ALAF).
In late May, the Campaign Legal Center (CLC), a nonprofit, nonpartisan Washington-based watchdog group, filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission alleging the ALF PAC misattributed the contribution. Worse, the complaint says, “the GEO Group and/or the GEO account appear to have violated the federal law that bars federal contractors from making political contributions, and either ALAF or ALF PAC appear to have violated the same law by soliciting that contribution.”
The complaint also notes that the government’s official source for spending data, USASpending.gov, shows that GEO “held 28 active federal contracts totaling over $2.5 billion on the3 date of the contribution.”
The complaint asks the FEC to investigate and seek “appropriate” sanctions.
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