The head of a private prison group that owns and operates 23 immigration detention facilities said Wednesday that lawsuits over conditions of confinement are “fundamentally unconstitutional.”
GEO Group CEO George Zoley said on a quarterly earnings call that the private prison group currently detains about 21,000 people in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody, which is about one-third of all ICE detainees. Detainees in some of those facilities have sued GEO Group and the federal government, alleging they are being held in unconstitutionally inhumane conditions.
“There has been litigation regarding overseeing of medical services, food services, general cleanliness, etc. It’s really unprecedented and, I believe it’s fundamentally unconstitutional,” Zoley said in remarks first reported by The Carceral Report.
GEO Group did not respond to an email asking what, specifically, is unconstitutional about the lawsuits.
In one ongoing suit against GEO Group, current and former immigration detainees in Aurora, Colorado, allege they were required to either clean the facility for no pay or risk being sent to solitary confinement. Detainees who participated in a voluntary work program were paid $1 per day for tasks such as preparing food and doing laundry. GEO has unsuccessfully argued that it should be immune from such litigation because it was acting as a contractor for the federal government.
Immigration detainees at the Adelanto ICE Processing Center, which is operated by GEO Group, sued the federal government earlier this year, alleging they have been denied medical care, outdoor access, adequate food and water, and that they are forced to live in unsanitary conditions.
“I am very worried about my health in Adelanto,” one detainee who described having mobility issues from a prior stroke wrote in a declaration. “It feels like the medical staff at Adelanto have no intention of truly helping me with my medical issues or to recover from my stroke.”
“The guards call us by our A-numbers and it seems like to them, we are just numbers, not people. I worry that they are going to let me die in here or if I had a medical emergency I would not get proper treatment,” the detainee continued.
Zoley also noted on the call that some “blue states” are “considering more active involvement in oversight of facilities.” He suggested that the “logical solution” would be for the federal government to own immigration detention facilities rather than private firms like GEO Group and CoreCivic, citing the Constitution’s Supremacy Clause, which states that federal law overrides state law. He indicated that GEO Group would “place particular importance on our ability to continue our support services at any facility sold to ICE.”
There are several ongoing lawsuits against the federal government related to conditions of confinement in immigration detention and federal judges have sided with detainees in some instances.
“The constitution does not give the federal government carte blanche to violate detained individuals’ rights. As numerous federal courts nationwide have upheld, the only unconstitutional conduct here is from ICE and the private prison companies that it contracts, including GEO Group,” Carmen Iguina González, the deputy director for immigration detention at the ACLU’s National Prison Project, wrote in an email.
The Trump administration has made mass detention a cornerstone of its immigration policy. Administration officials have repeatedly emphasized the brutality of immigration detention to pressure people to give up their legal rights and leave the U.S. rather than enduring detention until their immigration court date. This has been incredibly lucrative for companies like GEO Group.
“In 2025, we were awarded new or expanded contracts that represent up to approximately $520 million in new incremental annual revenues, which represents the largest amount of new business we have won in the single year in our company’s history,” Zoley said Wednesday.