The ICE Prison Contractor that Helped Trump Get Elected is Profiting Off Violence
“We’re treated like animals.”
In February, in suburban New Jersey, Martin Soto, a thirty-year-old father of two, left to buy diapers and never came home. ICE had arrested him. Since then, Martin has been held in detention, for the most part at Delaney Hall, the ICE detention center in Newark, New Jersey, operated by GEO Group, a prison contractor that has been widely reported to hold people in unsafe conditions and subject them to inhumane treatment.
“We’re not treated like people,” a man imprisoned at Delaney Hall told a local journalist recently. “We’re treated like animals.”
Earlier this year, prisoners at Delaney Hall had sent immigration activists an open letter, “Our Cry,” in which they wrote, “We feel vulnerable, in a way, kidnapped or detained without justification. We see with profound helplessness and frustration that the right to due process and legal counsel was violated.” Since then, prisoners have released two more open letters, which recount horrible conditions, including finding worms in their food, being forced into solitary confinement, and being denied medical care.
There are so many things to say about the violence ICE has inflicted on people across the United States–and both inside and outside Delaney Hall. Events are unfolding quickly. For the purpose of this newsletter, I’m going to focus just on the political and financial ties between ICE and GEO Group. The ties between them is a case study in how unchecked political corruption is enabling the worst manifestations of state violence.
In the simplest possible terms, GEO Group helped President Trump and Republicans in Congress get elected. In turn, Trump and Republicans in Congress have helped GEO Group profit from ICE rounding up and imprisoning immigrants. And now GEO Group and Trump are helping each other maintain their positions of power by fulfilling their symbiotic roles to inflict authoritarian violence on communities across the country.
Before returning to Delaney Hall, I want to lay out several important pieces of information to keep in mind as we watch footage of ICE being violent toward people protesting outside that facility or any other one operated in collaboration by the Department of Homeland Security and GEO Group.
Major ways GEO Group helped the GOP gain power:
Ahead of the 2024 election, GEO Group was the first corporation whose PAC maxed out its donations to President Trump’s campaign. Then, the company made another $500,000 donation via a subsidiary to Make America Great Again PAC.
GEO Group’s CEO, George Zoley, has also made significant contributions to President Trump’s campaign and other Republican causes.
Major ways the GOP is helping GEO Group profit:
In 2025, Congressional Republicans passed their megabill that allotted more than $70 billion for ICE.
Also in 2025, the Trump administration signed a $1 billion contract with GEO Group to convert Delaney Hall into an ICE prison.
The Trump administration has taken numerous actions– including setting deportation quotas, effectively curtailing the right to asylum for many, firing en masse immigration judges considered sympathetic to immigrant rights, arresting immigrants for political speech, and so forth– that help GEO Group keep its prisons stocked full of people.
This year, President Trump chose as the new acting Director of ICE former GEO Group executive, David Venurella, who worked for the company for over a decade.
GEO Group could make even more money this year. In just the first quarter of 2026, the company brought in $2.6 billion in revenue, a significant increase from last year.
CEO Zoley has said that he supports GEO Group facilities being federally owned because that helps the company avoid legal liability in potential lawsuits related to “oversight of medical services, food services, general cleanliness.”
The fact that the GEO Group and the Trump Administration are so financially tied gives a whole new dimension to the substandard conditions have been reported at multiple ICE detention centers, including GEO Group’s center in Dilley, Texas, where people being held don’t have access to clean water, and bright lights are kept on twenty-four hours a day, among other horrible conditions. According to a CNN investigation, almost fifty people have died in ICE detention so far during Trump’s second term.
Last month, 300 people being imprisoned in Delaney Hall went on a work and hunger strike to protest what they described as unsafe conditions and inhumane treatment. On the Sunday of Memorial Day weekend, roughly five months after Martin was first detained, Gabriela Soto, Martin’s wife, held a small press conference outside the facility calling attention to the strike.
Last week, ICE agents shoved, beat, and pepper-sprayed people protesting outside the building. ICE pepper-sprayed, journalists, volunteers, U.S. Senator Andy Kim (NJ), and many others. The scenes we’ve all witnessed over the last couple weeks are an escalation, but not anything new. Last year, before Delaney Hall reopened as an ICE detention center, Department of Homeland Security agents arrested Newark Mayor Ras Baraka while he took part in a demonstration against its conversion into an ICE facility.
Despite ICE agents and then New Jersey state police beating protesters, people kept showing up to protest in solidarity with the striking immigrants inside Delaney. This week, the state of New Jersey filed a new lawsuit against GEO Group that could force the closure of Delaney Hall. It’s tough to consider something like this a victory, because the entire situation is horrible in many ways, and the legal push is just a start, but at least New Jersey is using its power to push back. As we watch GEO Group respond and try to keep Delaney Hall open, we have to remember that although, yes, when it comes to denying people like Martin Soto their freedom, the cruelty is the point, but the goal is also to make prison companies like GEO Group a lot of money.
It goes a lot deeper than just GEO Group.
Entire companies have received all of their government contracts (or nearly all of them), just since the inauguration, and their donation history is absolutely chilling: https://vesperosint.substack.com/p/cash-for-hate-us-immigration-and?r=7zme4x
To call these facilities 'detention centers' is very misleading and dishonest. They are prisons of the worst kind where the incarcerated have been treated more like caged animals than human beings.
We know now that some 70% of those arrested by ICE had not criminal records. For most the only crime was entering the U.S illegally. Trump repeatedly lied that millions of rapists, murderers, pedophiles and people from mental institutions had snuck into our country.
Before we had any immigration policies, millions came to our shores seeking a better life and/or escaping arrest or other retribution. We are a country not built by angels. Those now imprisoned by ICE may not be angels either but most were hard working people seeking a better life fir themselves but mostly their children.
We deserve controlled borders and decide who is allowed to enter and the terms for becoming a citizen. The sad fact is those rules were conveniently ignored fir decades to provide cheap labor. We came close to major bipartisan immigration reform until Trump blew it up so as to make it a winning political issue.
So here we are spending hundreds if billions to deport mostly good, hard working people for political points. In the process we are violating human rights, civil rights and common decency. We now have labor shortages in many areas all helping to drive up costs.
We still need real immigration reform because we still need immigrants. Unfortunately as long as Trump and MAGA Republicans are in control it won't happen snd the cruelty will continue.