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GEO Group Gets $1 Billion ICE Contract at New Jersey Lockup
On February 26, 2025, then-acting federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Director Caleb Vitello announced a 15-year contract with The GEO Group, Inc. to reopen and expand its Delaney Hall detention center in Newark, New Jersey, which will house up to 1,000 migrants that ICE expects to detain while awaiting deportation. The price tag announced for the deal: an eye-popping $1 billion.
GEO Group also provides electronic monitoring of migrants on ICE’s non-detained docket. The Intensive Supervision Appearance Program (ISAP) currently monitors about 184,000 migrants, but that number could pass 300,000, GEO Group founder and Executive Chairman George Zoley said. That is a business opportunity on top of ICE’s detention needs, which Zoley estimated would mushroom from 41,500 current beds to more than 60,000 as the new administration of Pres. Donald J. Trump (R) seeks to make good on his campaign promise to conduct mass deportations.
To take advantage of those opportunities, GEO Group plans to spend $38 million renovating idled detention space in Georgia, Michigan and North Carolina, as well as the New Jersey site, which will be the largest ICE detention center on the U.S. east coast. Not willing to miss out on caging migrants, the company’s largest competitor, CoreCivic, Inc., announced plans to expand detention centers it runs for ICE in several states as well reopening a Texas lockup to hold entire families awaiting deportation, as reported elsewhere in this issue. [See: PLN, Apr. 2025, p.33.]
Sources: Nevada Current, West Virginia Watch
