MIAMI — A five story blue-and-white office building overlooking an LA Fitness in Boca Raton is a key cog in President Donald Trump’s mass deportation plan.

It’s the home of GEO Group, a 40-year-old company that operates more than four dozen immigrant detention facilities and prisons across the country.

The firm, which was founded by a Greek immigrant who entered the United States through Ellis Island, has cultivated relationships with top figures in the Trump administration, including Attorney General Pam Bondi and immigration czar Tom Homan.

Few companies have made a bigger killing from the administration’s turbocharged efforts to detain and deport undocumented migrants.

Ten days after Trump won last year’s presidential election, the company hired top Trump advisor and former Florida state congressman, Carlos Trujillo as a lobbyist. Trujillo’s firm, Continental Strategy, employs the daughter of Susie Wiles, Trump’s chief of staff.

The company contributed more than $500,000 backing President Trump’s election effort last year and then chipped in an additional $500,000 to support Trump’s inauguration this year.

It’s been money well spent.

The company has already landed contracts worth up to $500 million since Trump’s second inauguration on January 20, 2025, a Miami Herald analysis of federal contracting records found.

“We believe our company faces an unprecedented opportunity at this time to play a role in supporting President Trump’s new administration policy,” said George Zoley, GEO’s founder and executive chairman, in an earnings call in February. He added that GEO was “well positioned” to “scale up” its portfolio of detention and transportation facilities and electronic monitoring products in this “unique moment” in the company’s history.

The federal contracts include a renewal to a prior contract to operate the Broward Transitional Center, a detention facility in Pompano Beach.

Four months ago, the firm also agreed on a 15-year contract to operate an immigrant detention center in Newark, New Jersey. GEO told investors that it expects to generate $60 million in revenue from that deal in the first year alone and up to $1 billion over 15 years.

For-profit detention centers like those run by GEO have drawn intense scrutiny, especially over the last decade. For instance, a 2020 Congressional report documented numerous problems at privately-run facilities, including delayed and inadequate medical care, deficient sanitation and management of infectious diseases, overcrowded conditions, limited mental health support and lack of transparency.

In April, 44-year-old Marie Ange Blaise, a Haitian, died while being held at GEO’s Pompano Beach facility after complaining of chest pains. Her son told medical examiners that she had “chest pains and abdominal cramps” but detention staff refused her request to see a physician.

More recently, four detainees escaped from GEO’s Newark detention center, according to the New York Times. While the exact timing of the escape is unclear, detainees at the facility had faced off against guards over meager and dismal meals, unsanitary conditions and overcrowding that same day.

The company said that it is proud of the role it has played in supporting the law enforcement mission of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a GEO Group spokesperson said.

“Our innovative support service solutions have helped the federal government implement the policies of seven different Presidential Administrations,” he said.

Detainees at GEO’s facilities are provided “robust access” to medical facilities and professionals and off-site specialists, emergency services and access to local community hospitals is also provided when needed.

GEO did not respond to specific questions about cultivating relationships with influential figures in the government. George Zoley declined an interview request from the Herald.

Immigration is typically a civil ⁠— not criminal ⁠— matter under U.S. law but facilities that hold undocumented migrants remain places of confinement. Critics argue that the profit-driven model prioritizes occupancy over the welfare of detainees.

“No matter how you spin it, these are prisons,” said Faisal Al-Juburi of the Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services, a Texas-based immigrant rights group.

“There is no way to humanely detain people, especially families.”

Capital connections

GEO’s prospects looked very different a decade ago.

On August 18, 2016, Sally Yates, Obama’s attorney general announced that the Justice Department would be looking to phase out the use of private prisons.

“They simply do not provide the same level [compared to federally run Bureau of Prisons facilities] of correctional services, programs and resources; they do not save substantially on costs; and … they do not maintain the same level of of safety and security,” she wrote in a memo directing the bureau to “either decline or substantially reduce” contract renewals with for-profit prison companies.

GEO’s stock tumbled immediately.

The next day, GEO made a $100,000 contribution to Rebuilding America Now, a super PAC supporting Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and a further $125,000 a few months later, filings with the Federal Election Commission show. The company also contributed $250,000 for Trump’s inauguration in 2017.

Trump’s surprise 2016 victory would boost the company’s fortunes.

Jeff Sessions, then Trump’s attorney general, rescinded Yates’ guidance soon after Trump took office and the company has received hundreds of millions more in federal contracts since then.

Since 2016, GEO has also spent around $12 million in lobbying agencies like the Homeland Security and Justice departments.

Roughly two weeks after Trump took office on Jan. 20, 2017, the firm employed the services of Ballard Partners, a lobbying firm owned by Brian Ballard, who POLITICO dubbed the “most powerful lobbyist in Trump’s Washington” in 2018. Ballard lobbied the White House on the company’s behalf.

Attorney General Pam Bondi, then a lobbyist for Ballard Partners, also lobbied the White House and Department of Homeland Security in 2019 on the “use of public-private partnerships in correctional services.”

Tom Homan, the current immigration czar, disclosed providing consulting services to a subsidiary of GEO Group before he took office this year. He was paid at least $5,000 but the report does not specify the nature of his work for the company. MSNBC and the New York Times reported last month that Homan was the subject of an FBI investigation last year for allegedly accepting cash in exchange for help with winning government contracts in a second Trump administration.

Both Homan and the White House have strongly denied any wrongdoing and dismissed the investigation into Homan as politically motivated by the Biden administration.

“Tom Homan has not been involved with any contract award decisions,” said White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson. “He is doing a phenomenal job on behalf of President Trump and the country.”

Joe Biden, like Hillary Clinton before him, ran in 2020 on a platform that promised the end of the federal government’s use of private prisons. Stocks of contractors like GEO plummeted immediately after he was elected president.

But while Biden did end the use of prison contractors by the Justice Department, he did the opposite for immigration facilities and allowed ICE to expand its work with for-profit companies.

The move paved the way for Donald Trump to rapidly expand their use to hold undocumented migrants. The passage of the “One Big Beautiful Bill” in May this year earmarks a further $45 billion — more than three times what the government spent during the Biden and Trump’s first administration ⁠— to expand immigration detention centers in the country.

“Who stands to gain from such policies? It is the GEO Groups of the world,” said Al-Juburi of RAICES.

Zoley’s fortune

GEO Group was founded in 1984 by George C. Zoley. It went public ten years later.

The company received its first federal contract for immigration detention in Aurora, Colorado in 1987. Ten years and expansions into Australia and the United Kingdom later, it received a U.S. federal Bureau of Prison contract to operate a correctional institution in Taft, California ⁠— the first privately-run federal prison in the country.

Today, the firm’s portfolio includes more than 50 immigrant detention centers and correctional facilities in the United States, Australia, the United Kingdom and South Africa. It also runs a migrant detention facility in the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The company offers transportation services for inmates and detainees, electronic monitoring products, privatized healthcare for those in detention as well as financing, design and construction services for correctional facilities.

Zoley’s personal fortune has grown by $50 million since Trump got elected in 2024, according to Bloomberg estimates. It is now $304 million.

Zoley himself is an immigrant. Born in Greece, he arrived at Ellis Island aged three with his 28-year-old mother and five-year-old brother on September 19, 1953, archived passenger manifests from the ship Nea Hellas show. The historic ship helped thousands of Greeks make the two-week sea voyage from Athens to New York and often served as an escape route for hundreds fleeing the Nazi occupation and later, the difficult postwar years in Europe.

Zoley’s last name at the time was Zolis. The family travelled to Ohio and Zoley grew up in the small township of Copley, a 15-minute drive from Akron.

At the time, the path to naturalization was much easier: Individuals need only have been a resident in the United States for five years, not committed murder, not been in an American jail for more than 180 days and had to be “attached to the Constitution” and of “good moral character.” When he turned 18, Zoley was a shoo-in.

Six decades later, the Zoley family ⁠owns a nine-bedroom waterfront mansion and another four-bedroom single-family home in Boca Raton, both near the Royal Palm Yacht and Country Club. The properties, which the Zoleys had bought for a total of nearly $12 million, are now worth roughly $26 million, records show.

GEO facilities

Less than 10 miles southwest of the Zoley’s waterfront mansion stands one of the facilities that helped pay for it.

The flamingo pink Broward Transitional Center hides in plain sight on a stretch of road in Pompano Beach lined with palm trees and modest commercial buildings. There are no spools of barbed wire atop its fences or looming guard towers to announce its purpose.

Right below the American flag at the facility’s entrance is a flag emblazoned with the GEO Group’s logo.

Hundreds of people looking to emigrate to the United States sit inside the facility’s walls in limbo, waiting for a legal process that often stretches on for weeks, months or even years.

Detainees include asylum seekers, visa overstayers and those apprehended in Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids. Many of them have no history of violent crime.

Among them was Harpinder Singh Chauhan, a 56-year-old British entrepreneur, who recently went bankrupt, had tax problems and was arrested by ICE this spring. He was transferred to BTC on April 20.

He told Human Rights Watch, an international civil rights watchdog group, that staff at the facility deprived him of his insulin for nearly a week even though he had serious medical conditions including diabetes, pancreatitis and asthma. He collapsed while lining up for dinner one night and had to be rushed to a hospital with signs of cardiac arrest. Chauhan has since been deported to the United Kingdom.

GEO Group did not respond to the Herald’s questions about allegations of mismanagement and lack of care in its facilities. The company emphasized that its services are monitored by the Homeland Security Department and said that issues that arise are quickly addressed.

Sworn declarations by detainees filed in federal court and obtained by the Herald on condition of anonymity allege negligent medical care and crumbling infrastructure at GEO’s facility in Karnes, Texas. They also reveal the wide swath of people getting caught in ICE’s dragnet: An Iranian teen fleeing an abusive father, a Venezuelan looking for a safer life in the United States and a Mongolian family seeking asylum.

A Colombian detainee at Karnes stated in one declaration was arrested by ICE in Pompano Beach, had a fracture in his tibia ⁠— a bone in the leg. While at Karnes, he was taken to an offsite orthopedic clinic whose “walls were falling down.” The doctor ordered his crutches to be taken away and said the swelling and pain were “mental.”

Another testified that she, along with her mother and two younger brothers were detained at Karnes for some weeks. One of her brothers has severe autism and she said his symptoms got much worse in custody ⁠— he was angry, nervous and stopped eating. She herself started having panic attacks. Her mother and brothers were later released and she is now detained alone.

A Venezuelan who was arrested in Austin and detained at Karnes, said in another declaration that she has seen “people be carried out after passing out.” She said that officials always ignored her complaints about the cold temperatures inside affecting her asthma and that the food at the facility often smells off. The guards never answer detainees’ questions, she said, and yell at them to go back to their rooms.

“We came here looking for safety, a peaceful life where we are not living in constant fear,” she testified. “I want my freedom.”

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Miami Herald staff writers Antonio Delgado and Ana Claudia Chacin contributed reporting.

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