By Rose White
mlive.com
LANSING, Mich. — A private prison company is gearing up to rapidly expand its detention capacity under President Donald Trump’s pledge to deport millions of undocumented immigrants in the “largest deportation operation in the history of our country.”
GEO Group expects to more than double its detention beds, invest millions in immigration detention capacity and could reopen its idle facilities – including one in Michigan – company leadership said during a Feb. 27 investor call.
“We believe our company faces an unprecedented opportunity at this time to play a role in supporting President Trump’s new administration policies,” said GEO Group executive chairman of the board George Zoley.
GEO Group, the largest private contractor to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, invested $70 million last year to “deliver expanded detention capacity, secure transportation, and electronic monitoring services” for the federal government.
That investment will allow the company to add 17,000 detention beds – going from 15,000 to 32,000 – which could generate between $500 million and $600 million in annual revenue, according to the investor call.
Zoley called it a “unique moment in the company’s history.”
“We believe we are well-positioned to scale up our diversified segments in secure housing, transportation and electronic monitoring to meet the changing needs of this new administration and to continue to enhance value for our shareholders,” he said.
The expansion is already underway with GEO Group winning a new 15-year contract valued at $1 billion to reopen a 1,000-bed immigration detention facility in New Jersey. Announced this week, Delaney Hall is the first new ICE facility to open since Trump took office again.
GEO Group indicated it could revive its six other idled prisons across the country.
One of those is the North Lake Correctional Facility in Baldwin, Michigan, which closed three years ago when President Joe Biden ended all federal contracts with for-profit, private prisons. The others are in Colorado, Georgia, North Carolina and Texas.
GEO Group did not confirm if the North Lake Correctional Facility will reopen, but Zoley said there has been interest from ICE and the U.S. Marshal’s Service in “every one of our idle facilities.”
“I think the likelihood is that all our idle facilities will be activated in 2025,” he said. “To be a little more specific, we think the contracting of the additional detention beds will all take place in 2025.”
GEO Group reopened North Lake Correctional Facility to be a federal prison that houses non- U.S. citizen criminals in 2019. With 1,800 beds, the prison has been a major, yet unsteady, employer in Baldwin after closing and reopening multiple times over the past 26 years.
Since shuttering again in September 2022, North Lake has been under consideration to be converted into an ICE detention facility.
U.S. Reps. Bill Huizenga and John Moolenaar, both Republicans, floated this idea three years ago saying the facility could be “extremely useful to ICE” because “detention capacity is limited.”
But this faced backlash from more than 50 organizations that were “deeply troubled” by the proposal because “it follows a recent pattern of actions from the Biden administration contravening its stated goal of ending the use of private facilities for detention,” they wrote in a September 2022 letter.
That effort was led by a group called No Detention Centers Michigan that has actively fought the creation of ICE facilities in Michigan.
More recently, North Lake Correctional Facility was included in a trove of documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union earlier this year that confirmed ICE has been working to expand its detention capacity in eight states.
The heavily redacted records show private prison groups responded to ICE’s request for proposals during the Biden administration. The details of the proposals have not been released by ICE yet, but one cover letter is titled “Multi-State Detention Facility Support Chicago, IL Area of Responsibility (:CDR) North Lake Facility .”
“The worry is that this will just enable ICE to more quickly expand detention and execute what we now know is President Trump’s very clear intent to conduct the mass deportation of people,” said Eunice Cho, senior staff attorney at the ACLU’s National Prison Project.
It’s also concerning to Cho because some privately-owned ICE detention facilities have a reported history of abuse, neglect and unsafe conditions.
ICE did not respond to a request for comment.
Under the new Trump administration, ICE is already running out of space to put detainees as facilities hit 109% capacity earlier this month. The administration has also detained immigrants at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba and is eyeing new facilities in Texas.
Tom Homan, the White House border czar, has said he will need 100,000 beds to carry out a mass deportation plan – a significant increase in ICE’s current capacity of 41,500.
And the for-profit prison industry, which plays a significant role housing about 90% of ICE detainees, is set up to directly benefit from these expansion efforts as they ramp up quickly.
Zoley said GEO Group is expecting “several contract awards” by the end of the first quarter.
“The procurement process is moving at a speed that’s unprecedented,” he said. “We’ve never seen anything like this before.”
—
©2025 Advance Local Media LLC. Visit mlive.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.