How Geo Group tech became a cornerstone of Trump’s immigration crackdown

The story of a Honduran immigrant living in Louisiana captures the troubling transformation of U.S. immigration enforcement in the Trump era. According to the New York Times, after entering the country in 2022, the immigrant complied with an immigration surveillance program by submitting weekly selfies through a facial recognition app provided by the Geo Group, the nation’s largest private prison operator.

The app, part of the federal government’s so-called “Alternatives to Detention” program, was marketed as a humane substitute for physical incarceration. In exchange for his compliance, the immigrant was granted a work permit and remained free until February 2025 when he was summoned to an immigration office for what was said to be a routine tech update. Instead, agents were waiting. He was arrested on the spot and sent to a detention facility, where he remains.

This is not an isolated incident. According to the New York Times. the Geo Group has emerged as a major beneficiary of Trump administration immigration policies, supplying digital surveillance tools such as ankle monitors, smartwatches, and tracking apps to monitor immigrants throughout the U.S.

These technologies are increasingly being used to identify and detain individuals flagged by the system, with legal aid groups estimating that hundreds of arrests have resulted directly from the surveillance data collected. More than 30,000 immigrants were detained in President Trump’s first 50 days back in office, and many of them were part of the monitoring program that was designed to keep them out of detention centers in the first place.

Despite cost-cutting measures across most federal departments, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has expanded its contracts with the Geo Group. A 2024 contract to monitor approximately 180,000 immigrants was valued at $350 million. At the same time, lawmakers aligned with the administration have advocated tighter restrictions, including curfews and expanded location tracking. These efforts have buoyed Geo Group’s financial standing.

While digital monitoring only constitutes 14 percent of Geo Group’s $2.4 billion in annual revenue, it is the most profitable segment of its business, with margins near 50 percent. Investors have taken notice. Since Trump’s return to office, Geo Group’s stock has climbed, even amid market turbulence.

George Zoley, the company’s founder, has publicly embraced the administration’s immigration posture, stating that Geo Group was “built for this unique moment in our country’s history.”

Originally founded in the 1980s to operate private prisons, the company entered the surveillance space in 2011 by acquiring Behavioral Interventions (BI), a firm that began by tracking livestock and later pivoted to monitoring parolees and immigrants. With the government seeking cheaper alternatives to physical detention, the acquisition proved to be lucrative. Digitally tracking immigrants costs about $4.20 a day, compared to $150 per day for housing them in detention centers.

By 2022, more than 300,000 immigrants were enrolled in the Alternatives to Detention program. Yet, concerns about the program’s cost, effectiveness, and technical reliability began to surface. Former Geo Group employees and ICE officials reported numerous issues, from bugs in the check-in app to frequent smartwatch malfunctions and outdated servers that regularly crashed, the Times reported. These failures had real consequences for immigrants under surveillance, who could face detention simply because a device failed to register their check-in.

One case worker, who spoke to the Times on condition of anonymity, described being responsible for tracking up to 300 immigrants at once, with directives to complete twelve home visits in a single day. Each visit, limited to five minutes, required a full report on the immigrant’s living conditions.

The company billed DHS as much as $88 per visit. Meanwhile, immigrants’ lives were increasingly constrained by the surveillance technology. If they strayed outside their designated area or missed a check-in due to technical problems, alerts would be triggered. After three strikes, ICE could intervene with stricter measures or deportation.

Geo Group collects and stores surveillance data on private servers, making it difficult for government analysts to access or audit. Still, the company has kept its grip on federal contracts. Attempts under the Biden administration to open the contract to new bidders and develop cheaper alternatives were thwarted.

According to six officials familiar with internal deliberations cited by the Times, DHS considered segmenting the contract and establishing clearer standards for assessing risk levels, but the efforts were undermined by intense lobbying from Geo Group and allies inside ICE. Former ICE executive Daniel Bible, who helped stall reform efforts, now works for Geo Group.

Despite its claims of neutrality, Geo Group has been deeply enmeshed in the politics of immigration enforcement. A subsidiary of Geo Group donated over $2 million to Republican candidates ahead of the 2024 election, mostly to groups supporting Trump and congressional allies. Former officials have written editorials and launched smear campaigns against federal staffers who proposed changing the program. Industry analysts now estimate that the company’s monitoring business could generate $700 million through 2026, with financial giants like BlackRock and Vanguard among its largest shareholders.

The tools Geo Group provides have been used not just to track immigrants but to ensnare them. Legal advocates report a growing number of cases in which immigrants are detained at their homes, churches, or workplaces after being pinpointed via Geo Group’s systems. In one case, an individual was lured outside his home after being told his GPS tracker was malfunctioning, only to be arrested by ICE agents lying in wait.

For those under surveillance, the consequences are deeply personal. The software restricts where they can travel and often requires them to remain at home for extended hours to complete check-ins. These conditions hinder employment and social engagement, shrinking their world to the radius allowed by the app. As Laura Rivera of Just Futures Law put it, “Whatever radius is imposed, that becomes the size of their life.”

The Trump administration shows no signs of pulling back. With the passage of the Laken Riley Act, which mandates increased detention of immigrants with criminal histories, and statements from Geo Group’s leadership promising to scale surveillance to millions of participants, the groundwork is being laid for a vastly expanded digital dragnet.

Even with the internal pressure to reconsider the program’s cost and effectiveness, Geo Group’s deep ties to ICE, Capitol Hill, and pro-Trump factions have effectively shielded it from disruption. For a company that started by managing prison beds and pivoted to digital surveillance, the current landscape represents an unprecedented business opportunity. But for the immigrants caught in its algorithmic web, the cost is much higher.

Article Topics

biometric identification  |  biometrics  |  CBP  |  DHS  |  facial recognition  |  GEO Group  |  ICE  |  immigration  |  monitoring  |  U.S. Government  |  wearables