A demonstrator holds a sign reading ‘Protesting Against Genocide is not a Crime’ while joining a protest outside the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement building during the ‘Fight for Our Rights’ protest, 15 March 2025. [Getty]
Since the arrest earlier this month of recent Columbia University graduate Mahmoud Khalil, a private prison in Louisiana where he is being held has come into the spotlight. US President Donald Trump has said that this arrest is the “first of many to come”, suggesting that such facilities will see more business in the coming months.
Now that a prominent Palestinian activist has spent more than a week in detention at this facility, over than 800 kilometres from his home base of New York, questions are being raised about its conditions, funding, and its role in the US incarceration system.
What is GEO Group?
GEO Group is a security company based in Boca Raton, Florida that invests in around 100 private prisons and other incarceration facilities with around 80,000 beds in the US, the UK South Africa and Australia. It is the largest US-based prison business. In 1984, it was founded as Wackenhut Corrections Corporation, and in 1994, it was renamed Geo Group and was listed on the New York Stock Exchange, becoming one of its top 600 companies.
Decades earlier, Wackenhut Corporation (now a subsidiary of G4S Secure Solutions), was founded in 1954 in Coral Gables, Florida by George Wackenhut, a former FBI agent. The company’s interests have largely been focused on right-wing policies, having been accused of compiling names of suspected communists at the beginning of the Cold War, working with right-wing death squads in Central America, and supplying equipment needed for Saddam Hussein’s chemical weapons programme.
What is LaSalle Detention Center?
LaSalle Detention Center, also called the Central Louisiana ICE Processing Center, is one of around a hundred facilities managed by GEO Group. Located in Jena, around 350 kilometres from New Orleans, it was awarded its contract with ICE in 2007, previously having been a juvenile detention centre.
In 2016, the Southern Poverty Law Center found that LaSalle had among the lowest rates of legal representation in the US. There have been numerous allegations of human rights abuses at the facility.
In 2024, the American Civil Liberties Union issued a report called “Inside the Black Hole: Systemic Human Rights Abuses Against Immigrants Detained & Disappeared in Louisiana”. In their report, they point to deprivation of human necessities (such as sufficient food), abusive treatment and medical neglect.
How does GEO Group do business?
From its earliest foundations until now, GEO Group has been heavily reliant on government contracts. In early March, ICE awarded GEO Group a $1 billion contract for 15 years to detain immigrants in New Jersey, one of the biggest prison expansion deals since Trump began his second term. George Zoley, founder and executive chairman of GEO, reportedly said that this expansion could lead to $500 million to $600 million in addition revenues.
According to a report in Mother Jones, in early March, private prison companies, including GEO Group, are expected to make billions of dollars from reopening jails for ICE.
GEO Group has caught the attention of the divestment movement. In 2019, the largest public pension fund in the US, the California Faculty Association, announced it was divesting from private prison investments. Also in 2019, Forbes reported that GEO Group was running out of banks to do business with, after some of the biggest private banks had committed to cease doing business with immigrant detention facilities, largely under pressure from grassroots activists.
The stock price for GEO group nearly doubled in November 2024, shortly after the US presidential election, shot up again in February, dropped slightly, then increased again in recent days.
