ICE Boosts Income at Private Prison Company GEO Group by 800 Percent
Private prison company GEO Group’s net income rose 800 percent during fiscal year 2025, the company announced Thursday, thanks mainly to the Trump administration’s multibillion-dollar project to create a network of concentration camps across the country.
GEO Group’s net income for fiscal year 2025 was $254.3 million, compared to $31.9 million for the year before, executives said.
The earnings report comes as GEO Group’s stock price has plummeted by more than 60 percent after it rose sharply the day after Trump won the 2024 election. On Thursday, it fell by more than 14 percent to end trading at around $13.50 a share, partially due to fears of a backlash against Trump’s deportation surge.
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But a company’s stock prices and its profits are not perfectly correlated. Stock prices can reflect that investors are confident about a company because its profits are high; they can also reflect how investors feel about a company’s activities, the tendency for some to follow trading trends or the activities of major investors, and their expectations about the future. Those factors do not necessarily have bearing on whether a company wins millions of dollars’ worth of government contracts, as GEO Group has.
Executives said they expect revenue in 2026 to hit between $2.9 billion and $3.1 billion.
GEO chief executive George Zoley said he was “pleased” with the results and that the year was “the most successful period for new business wins in our company’s history. We expect ’26 to be as active as ’25.” He noted that the company still has 6,000 idle beds that the government could use in its effort to deport one million people annually. Executives said they expect the government will increase its prisoner capacity to “100,000 or more,” and prefers to run fewer but larger facilities.
Executives also said that they are “cautiously participating” in the Department of Homeland Security’s drive to buy warehouses across the country to retrofit as immigration prisons. One such sale in Kansas City was halted on Thursday after pressure from the public.
According to Bloomberg, investors are “still broadly optimistic” about GEO stock, with four analysts approving it as a “buy,” and none rating it as a “hold” or “sell.”
THE EARNINGS CALL ALSO COMES JUST DAYS after prisoners said that GEO employees had routinely assaulted and sexually assaulted them at an immigration prison in Washington state, and that the company responded by covering it up.
The three plaintiffs, all Black men in Tacoma, Washington’s Northwest ICE Processing Center, say that the assaults reflect a “recurring pattern by a group of guards,” especially defendants Justin Berame and Kobe Suafoa.
It accuses the two guards of a series of assaults in 2024, including against a 28-year-old from the Democratic Republic of Congo who arrived in the U.S. as a teen, named in the lawsuit only by his initials, RT.
According to RT, GEO Group guard Berame singled him out by name on April 2, 2024, separated him from his unit, and led him to a blind spot in the surveillance camera view path. Instead of the typical pat-down RT was expecting, Berame “began grabbing RT; not running his hands over RT to determine if something was hidden under the clothes, but gripping his body, his thighs in particular,” the lawsuit states. When Berame put his hand on RT’s crotch, RT flinched, the lawsuit states.
“At that point, Defendant Berame forced his hand into RT’s pants and groped his
penis and testicles. Nothing about the groping was reasonably designed to detect contraband,” the claim continues.
“When Defendant Berame wrapped his hand directly around RT’s penis, RT again flinched, and said something like, ‘what the hell?’ But Defendant Berame continued grabbing RT’s genitalia while staring him down, and said, ‘don’t move.’” Berame “again grabbed RT’s penis and held it for an unreasonable time. The guard’s purpose appeared to be to sexually humiliate RT, using sexual dominance to assert a pathological need for power and authority,” the lawsuit states.
RT was so disturbed that another prisoner, who had seen the two leave the area, asked what had happened. That prisoner told RT that Berame had done the same thing to someone else. RT reported the incident to officials and GEO Group conducted an internal investigation. Company officials first said there was a video of the assault that showed “inappropriate” conduct; they later said no footage existed.
Plaintiff Javon Gordon alleges he told Berame to stop touching him on November 13, 2024. In response, Berame and Suafoa tackled Gordon and slammed Gordon’s face into the concrete until he bled from the mouth and the head. Berame then climbed on Gordon’s back, causing Gordon to yell, “I can’t breathe,” the lawsuit states. The two guards cuffed Gordon’s hands and legs, kneed him in the ribs, carried him into solidarity confinement “and, in retaliation, placed him on suicide watch—despite Mr. Gordon repeatedly and loudly protesting that he was not suicidal,” the lawsuit claims. “To inflict further humiliation, Defendants stripped Mr. Gordon of his clothes as a female officer video recorded, and then took the bed, leaving Mr. Gordon with a flimsy suicide suit,” a garment designed to stop prisoners from using the fabric to make a noose and kill themselves.
The lawsuit describes another inconsistent internal hearing, in which the overseeing officer initially found Gordon was not at fault for his own assault, then changed to say he was and required Gordon remain in solitary confinement for a month. Berame taunted Gordon throughout that period to such an extent that a supervisor told him to stop, the lawsuit states.
The third plaintiff, Jeffersonking Anyanwu, came to the U.S. from Nigeria to study computer science. He was preparing an immigration appeal before the Ninth Circuit and had no attorney, so was responsible for filing everything himself. According to the lawsuit, GEO Group employees prevented Anyanwu from accessing a computer to do so and stonewalled when he asked to speak with a supervisor. Berame then beat him, including repeatedly striking him in the testicles, and refused a medical staff member’s direction to take him to the medical unit. Berame filed a report against Anyanwu, but the charges were dismissed because the incident was captured on video.
Plaintiffs claim gross negligence against GEO Group and all defendants and are asking for damages and medical and psychological expenses, among other forms of relief.
Spokespeople for GEO Group did not respond to a request for comment or questions about how guards are trained and policies regarding prisoners’ use of computers.
“This lawsuit is not just about what happened to the plaintiffs—it is about the dignity and safety of everyone held in detention. No one should fear sexual abuse, violence, or retaliation simply for speaking up or asserting basic rights. This case was brought in the hope that transparency can prevent others from being harmed in the same way. The goal is meaningful change,” Connelly Law Offices attorney Colin Prince, who is representing the plaintiffs, told the Prospect.
THE LAWSUIT IS AMONG THE REPEATED CLAIMS of criminality within GEO Group prisons. It notes that multiple other prisoners inside GEO Group’s Tacoma prison have alleged assaults from guards, including last November, when guards assaulted Steven Portillo to the point that he undertook a hunger strike to protest the treatment, and Marcos Chavez-Diaz, who guards assaulted so viciously in 2024 that he required a wheelchair to be transported, the lawsuit states. “Worse, Defendant GEO Group trains new guards to follow suit,” by using a video of the attack on one of them “as an example of how to teach detainees a lesson” during training sessions, the lawsuit contends.
It notes that the defendants repeatedly reported the assaults to the Tacoma Police Department, which “effectively ignored them and allowed Defendant GEO Group to investigate itself.” RT also reported the sexual violence he endured to the Department of Homeland Security’s Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties.
It also alleges that the Tacoma Police Department failed to respond to repeated reports from the plaintiffs that they had been beaten and sexually assaulted, a pattern of neglect the University of Washington documented last April when it found that only two reports of abuse or assault from the Tacoma immigration prison were prosecuted between 2015 and 2025 out of the 157 reports filed. University of Washington researchers noted that while the prison receives federal funding, it is a private, for-profit business and not a federal prison, staffed by private guards GEO Group employs, not law enforcement agents. Any crimes committed at the prison “fall squarely in the jurisdiction of the Tacoma Police Department.”
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