Bennito L. Kelty
Audio By Carbonatix
One of the largest private prison companies in the world, the GEO Group, is tied up in a Supreme Court battle as the company gains attention for contracts with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
And that case started in Aurora, which has played a key role in President Donald Trump’s mass deportation plan in more ways than one.
The GEO Group operates the Aurora Immigrant Processing Center, where ICE sends detainees facing deportation. The Florida-based company operates more than fifty similar facilities in the United States and abroad, managing more than 60,000 prisoners worldwide. It has a market value of about $2.4 billion, and at times, has ranked as the largest private prison company in the world, jostling with fellow U.S. federal contractor CoreCivic over the years.
On Monday, U.S. Supreme Court justices heard arguments in the case Menocal v. the GEO Group, which involves the question of what kind of legal immunity the Geo Group has under federal prison contracts.
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In 2014, Alejandro Menocal, a Mexican immigrant who lived in Golden before his arrest, worked in a dollar-a-day work program at the Aurora ICE facility while awaiting his deportation. Menocal was able to resolve his immigration case and stay in the U.S., but he wasn’t happy about the work program, alleging that the GEO Group underpaid him, according to minimum wage laws, and violated forced labor and trafficking laws by threatening him and other inmates with solitary confinement for not doing tasks for free. In October 2014, other detainees from the Aurora facility signed onto a class-action lawsuit brought by Menocal against the GEO Group in the U.S. District Court of Colorado.
The GEO Group has argued that it is immune from the lawsuit because the company contracts with the federal government, and was only following ICE’s detailed instructions for how to handle detainees.
In 2015, a district court judge ruled that the GEO Group is not immune from the lawsuit, but claims that Menocal and others were underpaid were dismissed. The GEO Group still had to defend against alleged trafficking and forced labor violations, however.
No final ruling on the case has been made during the decade it has been in court, largely because the GEO Group filed motions raising questions about what specific powers federal contractors have, but the Supreme Court agreed to hear Menocal v. the GEO Group in January 2025 based on a petition filed by the GEO Group.
Justices are now weighing the question of whether federal contractors can file an immediate appeal to lawsuits. An immediate appeal challenges a court ruling before the case is concluded, as opposed to most appeals, which occur afterward. In this case, the GEO Group wants to appeal the district court’s decision to deny its immunity. The company has already lost huge sums in lawsuits in other states over the same dollar-a-day work program. (ADD LINK TO OTHER LAWSUITS)
As the case goes through the Supreme Court, here are seven things to know about the GEO Group.
The GEO Group’s First Contract Was in Aurora
The Wackenhut Corporation was one of the largest private security companies in the world. Founded by a former FBI agent, the company created a division in 1984 to work solely with prisons and correctional services, the Wackenhut Correctional Corporation (WCC).
Three years later, the WCC secured its first contract: a deal to design, build and manage an immigrant detention center for Immigration and Naturalization Services (INS) in the city of Aurora, Colorado, according to the GEO Group. The facility opened in May 1987.
In 2003, the WCC changed its name to the GEO Group as part of a deal by the Wackenhut Corportation to reacquire a large share of the company that had been dealt away.
The GEO Group has been operating in Aurora for nearly fifty years, but the company has made more headlines since Trump returned to office in January. With Trump having touted his mass deportation plan, which he once dubbed “Operation Aurora” while on the campaign trail in Colorado, the GEO Group has been busy investing $70 million to expand its facility to house the number of people detained in Aurora from 300 at a time to upwards of 1,400. According to Latino advocacy groups, ICE’s raids in Colorado have been the largest in the country.
ICE Relies on the GEO Group to Keep Immigrants Detained
ICE arrests immigrants and deports them, but the GEO Group handles the middle step of keeping them detained while ICE secures a removal order from a judge.
Despite the Aurora ICE facility’s name, only about one or two ICE agents are inside the facility at a time, according to the federal agency. Although ICE denies entry to certain officials and outlines how the GEO Group should treat its detainees, most of the operations inside are handled by the GEO Group.
ICE has detained more than 60,000 people in the U.S. and hopes to increase its detention capacity to 100,000, according to reporting by the Washington Post. For Trump’s mass deportation to work, ICE needs places to put a city’s worth of detained immigrants behind bars while initiating removal proceedings in immigration court, a process that can be stalled at times.
According to the Washington Post in August, the Trump administration plans to open three new ICE detention facilities in the Colorado cities of Hudson, Walsenburg and Ignacio. Members of Colorado’s congressional delegation have confirmed that Hudson will have a new facility, Ignacio is on the Southern Ute Reservation; the tribe released a statement in August stating it had no agreement with ICE to build a new detention facility.
From 2009 to 2014, the GEO Group held Alaska state prisoners at the facility in Hudson that will reportedly be reopened and used by ICE. From 1997 to 2010, its rival CoreCivic operated the facility that ICE is expected to use in Walsenburg. The two facilities would be about the size of Aurora’s ICE detention center, with between 1,100 to 1,400 beds.
The GEO Group Offers a “Turnkey” Suite of Detention Services
On the GEO Group’s website, the company says it offers “turnkey solutions” for incarceration. Ironically, “turnkey” is a seventeenth-century English term for jailer, but GEO Group means it in the sense of offering everything needed from the ground up.
The GEO Group boasts that it doesn’t just provide the detention center guards: The company designs the facility, finances it, builds it, cleans it, transports the inmates, feeds them and sets up any classes or work programs they take inside.
The GEO Group also offers services for people who are out of detention but still under supervision, like electronic tracking devices made by BI Incorporated, a Boulder-based company. The GEO Group also operates nonresidential and residential re-entry centers, sometimes called halfway houses, which are supervised housing or work programs for people leaving incarceration.
ICE Contracted with the GEO Group After Its Own Name Change
The GEO Group has been running the Aurora facility since 1987, but the contract went from INS to ICE in 2004, less than a year after Congress had bumped ICE from being a post-9/11 bureau to a partial replacement for INS.
The INS had been around since 1933, and references to it often pop up in older TV and film, like in 1993’s Coneheads, where INS agents are the main villains. The INS was the country’s primary immigration enforcement arm for seventy years. Along with Border Patrol, the INS had led some of the largest deportation efforts in the U.S., like Operation Wetback. After 9/11, the U.S. created the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and removed INS, which was a part of the Justice Department, entirely.
The DHS was broadly put in charge of protecting U.S. soil and borders, with agencies like FEMA, the Secret Service and the Coast Guard stuffed into it. The INS’s responsibilities were split among three agencies: Border Patrol (which had been around longer than INS), Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and ICE.
While Border Pareol makes sure no one crosses borders illegally and CBP makes sure nothing dangerous gets through legal entryways, ICE handles the immigrants already in the country, and ICE was largely seen as the successor to the INS and the man source of the country’s immigration enforcement agents.
Today, ICE has a $45 billion budget after it was allocated more money in Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill, including to build more detention facilities.
The GEO Group Is No Stranger to Lawsuits
The GEO Group has consistently faced lawsuits for the past few decades, spending millions on settlements.
The federal government sued the company in 2010 over claims that male managers sexually harassed female employees at a prison in Arizona, resulting in a $140,000 settlement by the GEO Group in 2013, and then another $60,000 payment three years later to settle another claim in the same case. Then, the GEO Group paid $550,000 to comply with a consent decree that resulted from more claims coming up in the same sexual harassment suit, known as EEOC and ACRD v. the GEO Group.
In 2015, the GEO Group paid $50,000 to settle a First Amendment case brought by Prison Legal News, which claimed the company censored its coverage of the New Castle Correctional Facility in Indiana.
In 2017, Iranian immigrant Kamyar Samimi died in the Aurora ICE facility after being cut off from methadone. The ACLU of Colorado sued the GEO Group for wrongful death, resulting in a confidential settlement between the GEO Group and Samimi’s family in 2020.
In 2021, a federal jury ordered the GEO Group to pay $17 million in back wages to detainees at a Tacoma ICE facility for its dollar-a-day program. An appellate court upheld that ruling in January 2025 and increased the payout to $23 million.
In 2022, Nicaraguan immigrant Melvin Ariel Calero Mendoza died in the Aurora ICE facility from a pulmonary embolism. Two years later, his family filed a wrongful death suit, which is still ongoing.
In July, Congressman Jason Crow sued the Trump administration and DHS after being denied entry to the Aurora ICE facility. That lawsuit is ongoing, but the GEO Group isn’t liable for that one.
The GEO Group Operates Prisons in Australia, South Africa
The GEO Group operates three total prisons abroad, including two in Australia and one in South Africa.
The Fulham and Ravenhall correctional centers in Australia, both in the southeastern state of Victoria, are medium-security male prisons. Ravenhall, located next to Melbourne, can hold about 1,300 people, making it one of the largest correctional centers in the state and one of the largest in the country. Fulham holds about 900 people and is flung further east in a more rural area.
In South Africa, the GEO Group co-runs the Kutama Sinthumule Correctional Center, a 3,000-bed maximum security male prison. It’s run through a public-private partnership where the GEO Group helped build and manage the facility, which is publicly owned and located in a rural northeastern part of the country. A riot broke out there in 2023, and a major fire led to a partial shutdown.
The Geo Group’s three international detention facilities deal with criminal offenders incarcerated in their own country. Stateside, most of the detention facilities that the GEO Group manages are for immigrants facing deportation, who haven’t been criminally charged by the U.S. These imiigrants might face charges in their own country, but they’re held in facilities like the Aurora detention center for civil immigration violations. Unlike the detention centers in the U.S., none of the international facilities hold women, either.
Multiple Activists Have Been Held in GEO Facilities
In March, ICE arrested immigrant activist Jeanette Vizguerra, who had gained a national profile in 2017 after evading deportation by taking refuge in a Denver church. She’s been detained at the Aurora ICE facility since her arrest, with weekly vigils in her support taking place every Monday.
Vizguerra told supporters in September that she filed a motion to be released soon while ICE tries to secure her removal order, which has been stymied by her lawyer’s request for her release. She was arrested around the same time two other known activists were in other parts of the country. All were transferred to GEO Group detention facilities, but Vizguerra is the only one still detained.
Just a few days before Vizguerra’s arrest in mid-March, ICE arrested Columbia University student Mahmoud Khalil in New York and then transferred him to a GEO Group detention center in Louisiana. Khalil’s arrest drew outcry because he was a leader in pro-Palestine protests the previous year. Khalil was let out by a federal judge ruling in June.
In Washington, activist Alfredo “Lelo” Juarez Zeferino was arrested in June 2025 and ultimately chose to return to Mexico shortly after. His supporters say he was arrested because he’s known as a prominent farmworker organizer.
