Though their detention centers have been plagued by allegations of negligence and poor conditions, Geo Group and CoreCivic are poised to make bank off Trump’s immigration crackdown. But can they handle millions of new detainees?
The prognosis for Dulce Atahuaman Carhuancho was grim. Doctors at the Oschner Lafayette General Hospital in Louisiana had told the 21-year-old’s family she might not survive her brain bleed. Though the cause of the injury and the bruises across her body was not clear, her lawyers believe it was the result of trauma she’d suffered inside the South Louisiana ICE Processing Center (SLIPC), a female-only detainment facility for immigrants run by $5 billion-valued private prison company Geo Group.
A Peruvian national, Carhuancho had been moved to SLIPC after being detained in Arizona, where she’d told customs officials she was seeking political asylum. She spent a month there before being rushed to Oschner Lafayette where, according to a suit brought against Geo, she arrived with “evidence consistent with repeated sexual abuse and trauma, including significant bruising in and around her buttocks.”
Carhuancho survived, but with brain damage. Released from ICE custody after she was discharged from the hospital in late 2023, she still struggles to walk unaided, often requires help using the bathroom and only began feeding herself again last July, her family lawyers told Forbes. To this day, she has no recollection of what happened to her inside SLIPC.
And Geo Group has done little to explain.
The Carhuanchos are suing Geo, alleging multiple failures to protect Dulce and an effort to conceal its negligence. They claim the company has not shared how she sustained her injuries and has provided almost no information on her confinement at SLIPC. Responding to an October subpoena for investigative reports, movement logs and surveillance footage related to the incidents that harmed Carhuancho, Geo returned only a single medical report and a basic inmate file.
Now, a year and a half after the incident, the Carhuanchos say the detainment facility still has not provided an account of what caused Dulce’s injuries. “To our knowledge, Geo has done nothing,” said Jill Craft, one of Carhuancho’s attorneys, who filed their suit last September. “What happened to our client is a travesty.” Geo spokesperson Christopher Ferreira told Forbes the company denied all the allegations in the Carhuanchos’ suit, describing them as “baseless.” The suit is ongoing.
As the Trump administration ramps up what it claims will be the largest mass deportation effort in U.S. history, Carhuanchos’ allegations and others like them raise questions about how an already overtaxed system will handle what will likley be an unprecedented influx of new detainees.
A Forbes review of over 20 lawsuits filed against Geo and its chief competitor CoreCivic in the last year and interviews with former staff found repeated allegations of mismanagement, understaffing and dangerous conditions at their facilities (all the cases are ongoing, bar one that was settled out of court). And a recent American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) report into fatalities at ICE detention centers between 2017 and 2021 noted that of the 52 total immigrant deaths reported, 18 occurred at CoreCivic properties, and 13 at Geo facilities. The report found 95% were preventable.
“The quantities of drugs seized are exceptionally large, given that they are located within a secure federal facility.”
The FBI in a search warrant for a CoreCivic prison
In 2018, Geo Group had also been penalized for deficiencies in medical care at its Aurora Detention Center in Colorado following the death of a detainee whose medication for opioid use disorder was discontinued, per the ACLU report. Geo declined to comment on the report.
That report also noted two suicides at a facility in Georgia in 2018 for which ICE fined CoreCivic for failing in its duty of care, including failure to comply with suicide prevention guidelines. CoreCivic said that the ACLU’s data did not specify which deaths at CoreCivic facilities it found to be preventable and noted that three deaths that occurred at the Otay Mesa Detention Center occurred before it was in charge of healthcare services there. CoreCivic didn’t respond to request for comment on the two suicides.
“What we hear from our clients and other people who are detained [in private ICE centers] is just a basic lack of humanity in terms of the conditions inside in the cleanliness, the medical care, pretty much every aspect of of life,” said Liz Casey, a social worker for the Florence Immigrant & Refugee Rights Project, which offers free legal services to ICE detainees in Arizona, where CoreCivic and Geo run correctional complexes. Both companies contested that characterization, saying they provided humane and clean facilities with accredited healthcare for detainees.
Geo and CoreCivic, as well as their two smaller rivals LaSalle Corrections and Management and Training Corporation (MTC), are eagerly awaiting a boom in business as the Trump administration ramps up its deportation programs. After Trump’s win, Geo CEO George Zoley enthused in a November earnings call that the President-elect’s immigration stance presented an “unprecedented opportunity,” and said the business was looking at a “potential doubling of all of our services.”
DHS data from 2023 shows that some 90% of ICE detainees were being held at private institutions with an estimated 80% of those housed at CoreCivic and Geo Group facilities. That’s been good business for both. In the penultimate year of Trump’s first term in 2019 they posted record revenue — $1.98 billion and $2.48 billion respectively. They made roughly the same under Biden in 2023, $1.9 billion and $2.41 billion. Both count ICE as their biggest customer, accounting for 30% of CoreCivic’s revenue and 43% of Geo’s, according to the companies’ most recent quarterly results.
Now, with Trump promising the largest mass deportation effort in U.S. history, they seem poised for a significant boost; $2.5 billion-valued CoreCivic and Geo stock prices spiked 76% and 75% respectively on the president’s victory in November. Since then the two companies have been laying the groundwork to secure the ICE contracts likely to come from a new wave of arrests. Both submitted contract proposals in answer to an ICE request to expand detention capacity. And this month, the agency signed a $20 million deal with Geo and a $6 million one with CoreCivic.
The question is: Are the companies prepared for the huge influx of detainees —as many as 11 million over the coming years — should Trump deliver on his campaign promise? Both Geo and CoreCivic have been called out for alleged dangerous and unsanitary conditions inside their buildings. In 2022, a year before Carhuancho entered SLIPC, an unannounced inspection of Geo’s complex by the Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman found insufficient medical staffing levels, inadequate emergency response planning and a mosquito infestation among manifold other issues. Geo did not answer questions about the ombudsman’s findings.
Last year, the nonprofit Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights, the ACLU and other immigration-focused groups released a report on conditions at 9 Louisiana ICE jails, including 4 run by Geo Group. Based on two years of visits and interviews with over 6,000 people, from inmates to facility employees, the report found that these centers “routinely violate ICE’s own minimum standards of care and state, federal and international law.” Among the violations alleged: “deprivation of human necessities, abusive and discriminatory treatment, and medical abuse and neglect,” including denying surgery to a man with an eight pound hernia, repeated denials of oncologist appointments to people suffering from cancer and delaying treatment for strokes, seizures and heart attacks. Geo did not respond to questions about the report.
In a wrongful termination suit filed against the CoreCivic-managed Otay Mesa Detention Center in San Diego, a healthcare worker alleged she was fired after raising concerns about mistreatment, neglect and failures to provide adequate medical support. The suit describes the facility as vastly understaffed and ill-equipped to deal with the needs of 1,500 detainees, and recounts a number of alleged incidents in which their lives were endangered. Court records show the claimant is in out-of-court settlement discussions with CoreCivic, which had previously denied all the allegations in the suit. CoreCivic public affairs manager Brian Todd said the company provided accredited healthcare to high standards, adding that everyone at Otay Mesa has access to 24-hour medical services.
At CoreCivic’s Cibola County Correctional Center (CCCC) in New Mexico where 220 ICE inmates are detained, the breadth of the drug trade has stunned even FBI investigators who remarked on “the sheer volume of controlled substances being trafficked” there. “The quantities of drugs seized are exceptionally large, given that they are located within a secure federal facility,” the FBI wrote in a search warrant. CoreCivic’s Todd said the company was supporting law enforcement in trying to root out drugs from inside CCCC.
At this facility too, staffing appears to have been an issue. In a deposition from a recent wrongful death suit filed by the family of a drug overdose victim, a CCCC guard admitted to napping on the job and sleeping in his car between 16-hour shifts (CoreCivic denied wrongdoing and the suit was settled out of court last year). William Ontiveros, a former unit manager at CCCC who also claims to have been wrongfully terminated, told Forbes night shifts were often understaffed. “They did not have enough staff to provide around the clock coverage,” he said.
The FBI had a similar assessment. “CoreCivic struggles to keep CCCC operating in a safe and efficient manner,” its investigators wrote in its warrant related to the drug trade there. Taylor Smith, a lawyer at Smith & Marjanovic Law, who has represented a number of clients who’ve sued CoreCivic in recent years, had a blunter assessment: “It’s the worst facility in the state.”
Todd denied claims of understaffing. “We work to meet or exceed our daily staffing patterns at CCCC,” he said. “We provide a safe, humane and appropriate environment for the individuals in our care and are constantly striving to deliver an even better standard of care.”
“Private prison companies don’t get paid to rehabilitate people. They get paid to store them.”
Devon Kurtz, policy director at Cicero Institute
At CoreCivic’s Torrance County Detention Facility (TCDF), 130 miles east of CCCC, inmates say their care literally stinks. Since 2023, ICE detainees have complained of sewage leaks that in some cases have led to human waste overflowing into their living quarters, according to the Innovation Law Lab, which provides legal aid and advocates against the exploitation of immigrants. It set up an Instagram account where inmates share their experiences. “We were walking around and stepping on poop,” said one. “Everybody started throwing up.”
Innovation Law Lab attorney Tiffany Wang claims CoreCivic has repeatedly failed to address the leaks in a timely manner. “Officials in the detention center are not bringing in anyone to clean it up,” she told Forbes. “They literally tell the detained folks that either they clean it up or it’s not going to be cleaned up.”
CoreCivic disputed claims of unsafe conditions, denying detainees were exposed to sewage, and said they were allowed to leave the affected area. In a statement, the company blamed inmates for the leaks, saying they had flushed “foreign objects and/or an excessive amount of toilet paper in the toilets.”
In December 2023, Senator Martin Heinrich wrote to the DHS to complain about conditions at TCDF, saying his own staff had visited earlier that year and identified “maintenance shortcomings” that jeopardized “the safety, wellbeing and dignity of individuals in custody.” Then last year, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders and a number of other U.S. senators called for ICE to cease contracting CoreCivic at TCDF. CoreCivic said that no oversight bodies had found any substandard or dangerous conditions at TCDF.
“Private prison companies don’t get paid to rehabilitate people. They get paid to store them. So they store them cheaply and efficiently,” said Devon Kurtz, a policy director covering criminal justice at Cicero Institute, a nonprofit set up by Palantir cofounder, venture capitalist and Trump supporter Joe Lonsdale. “I wouldn’t say that they’re any worse at rehabilitation than the government prisons, but they certainly haven’t been better.”
Cicero Institute is backing a new, nonprofit model for prisons through Social Purpose Corrections, a new nonprofit founded by Brian Koehn, a former warden at CCCC and multiple other CoreCivic facilities across seven states, who is convinced its model is fundamentally flawed because for-profit companies’ cost-cutting often leads to understaffing and underinvestment in safety.
Instead, Social Purpose Corrections is pushing for contracts with baked-in incentives that would reward prisons and detention centers for improving conditions, ensuring adequate healthcare and cutting recidivism rates. “The important distinction with us is we’re not motivated about feeding Wall Street and meeting all these projections for revenue. We’re just motivated by helping people,” Koehn told Forbes. “We want to provide a humane solution for President Trump and his initiative on detaining illegal, criminal aliens.”
If the model does get traction, it’ll be too late to help the likes of Carhuancho, who continues to struggle with her injuries. In the meantime, she is in immigration limbo. Her attorneys said she’s been told ICE has no interest in pursuing her deportation, even though she’s not yet been granted asylum. But that was before Trump was sworn into office.
This article was originally published on forbes.com and all figures are in USD.
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