Monitor. Hunt. Detain.
Noem is out. GEO Group — the company that does all three and runs ICE — remains.
The Closed Loop
Today, Trump announced that DHS Secretary Kristi Noem is out — replaced by Sen. Markwayne Mullin, effective March 31. Half of Americans now support abolishing ICE. Noem’s departure changes the face of the machine. It does not change the machine. This is the story of the machine.
Please consider a free subscription to help support the work.
On a Thursday morning in February 2025, The GEO Group reported quarterly earnings to Wall Street. Executive Chairman George Zoley opened the call with a phrase that should be preserved for history:
“We believe our company faces an unprecedented opportunity at this time to play a role in supporting President Trump’s new administration policies.”
The opportunity is human suffering. The scale is mass detention. One year later, GEO’s Q4 2025 revenue hit $707.7 million — up 23% — with projections of $800 million to $1 billion in additional annual income. The revenue is denominated in people.
In a December 2025 investor presentation, GEO cited an “alien population” of 16.8 million — a figure sourced from the Federation for American Immigration Reform — framing it as market opportunity. Zoley told investors that GEO’s subsidiary could “scale up its monitoring contract to serve millions of people for ICE.”
Millions.
To understand what that sentence means — a private corporation offering to surveil millions of people for the federal government — you have to understand what GEO Group actually is.
It isn’t a prison company.
It’s a closed loop.
The Three Functions
The system that detains immigrants in America operates through three functions: surveillance, location, and detention.
Surveillance: Track where people are. Monitor their movements. Analyze their relationships. Identify who can be arrested.
Location: When someone disappears from the surveillance net — misses a check-in, removes an ankle monitor, fails to report — find them. Hunt them down.
Detention: Once located, hold them. Process them. Deport them or keep them indefinitely.
Traditionally, these functions were separated. The government surveilled. Law enforcement located. Facilities detained. Different agencies, different contractors, different chains of accountability.
The closed loop is what happens when one company does all three.
The GEO Group Monopoly
GEO Group operates 95 facilities with approximately 75,000 beds. That’s the detention function.
But in 2011, GEO acquired BI Incorporated for $415 million. BI started in 1978 monitoring cattle. By 2011, it tracked 60,000 people. Today, BI’s SmartLINK app monitors 182,000 immigrants through GPS tracking and facial recognition check-ins.
That’s the surveillance function.
On December 16, 2025, ICE awarded BI a $121 million contract for “skip tracing” — the industry term for bounty hunting. BI’s investigators use surveillance data, commercial databases, and physical observation to track immigrants to their homes so federal agents can arrest them.
That’s the location function.
One company. All three functions. The closed loop.
How the Loop Works
Here’s how the loop works in practice — a composite based on documented cases.
Sofia is an asylum seeker released on the Alternatives to Detention program. She’s required to use SmartLINK — BI Incorporated’s phone app. Every day, she submits a facial recognition selfie to prove she’s where she’s supposed to be. GPS tracks her movements. The app monitors her compliance.
Sofia misses a check-in. Maybe her phone died. Maybe she was at a medical appointment. Maybe the app glitched. The system flags her as “non-compliant.”
BI’s skip-tracing division receives a case file. They pull commercial databases: utility records, credit reports, social media activity, cell phone location data purchased from data brokers. They identify her likely location.
BI contacts ICE. ICE sends agents. Sofia is arrested.
Sofia is transported to a GEO Group detention facility. GEO charges the federal government $150-200 per day to house her.
One company tracked her. The same company found her. The same company profits from her detention.
The contract even incentivizes speed: DHS pays higher rates if BI verifies an address on the first attempt or finishes 90% of its caseload before the deadline — what an agency official called encouraging “accuracy, efficiency, and professionalism,” and what Rep. Krishnamoorthi called “quotas and cash rewards with minimal oversight.”
The Filing Cabinet That Scaled
GEO Group didn’t invent this model. It inherited it.
In 1954, George R. Wackenhut — a former FBI special agent — founded a company that became the Wackenhut Corporation. Two things made Wackenhut successful: political connections and files.
By 1965, Wackenhut claimed to maintain dossiers on 2.5 million suspected dissidents — one in every 46 American adults. By 1966, after acquiring files from the House Committee on Un-American Activities, Wackenhut claimed the largest privately held file on suspected dissidents in America: more than four million names.
The surveillance infrastructure built to track civil rights demonstrators didn’t disappear. It evolved.
In 1987, Wackenhut Corrections — later renamed GEO Group — won its first immigration detention contract in Aurora, Colorado. That facility still operates today, expanded from 300 beds to 1,400.
In 2011, GEO acquired BI Incorporated. The filing cabinet went digital.
The same company that once compiled dossiers on suspected communists now operates the world’s largest private immigration surveillance network.
Palantir: The Targeting Layer
GEO’s closed loop operates within a larger system. The targeting layer that identifies who to arrest runs on Palantir — a company founded in 2003 by Peter Thiel with $2 million from In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital arm.
Palantir was explicitly designed to continue the mass surveillance capabilities that Congress had banned. In 2003, public outcry killed the Pentagon’s Total Information Awareness program (TIA) — a system designed to integrate every government database to track individuals across all their activities. Shortly after TIA’s defunding, Thiel and CEO Alex Karp met with John Poindexter — the recently fired TIA director — at the home of Richard Perle. Poindexter told them he thought they had “an interesting idea.” Palantir rebuilt TIA in the private sector. What Congress killed, venture capital resurrected.
By 2025, Palantir had won over $10 billion in government contracts. In April 2025, ICE awarded Palantir $30 million to build ImmigrationOS — an AI platform integrating previously separated government databases:
IRS tax records
Social Security files
Passport records
License plate reader data
Immigration databases
That $30 million was a down payment. In February 2026, Palantir landed a five-year, $1 billion DHS purchase agreement — a 33x escalation that cements the company as the permanent data backbone of immigration enforcement. ICE is now developing a Palantir-powered tool called ELITE that assigns confidence scores to target addresses — not just integrating databases but generating automated targeting recommendations. The algorithm decides who to hunt.
In June 2025, a group of senators and representatives led by Ron Wyden and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez warned that Palantir’s expanding government work — including a searchable IRS database — creates a “surveillance nightmare” that “will make it significantly easier for Donald Trump’s Administration to spy on and target his growing list of enemies.” The same company building that IRS database also built ImmigrationOS.
ImmigrationOS is the successor to Palantir’s FALCON system, which ICE has used since 2014 to plan and execute raids. During the 2018 7-Eleven raids, an ICE supervisor instructed agents to use FALCON’s mobile app “to share info with the command center about the subjects encountered in the stores as well as team locations.”
During the 2019 Mississippi mass raids — the largest single-state immigration enforcement operation in U.S. history — ICE used Palantir technology to identify targets.
But government databases are only part of the data layer. In March 2026, 404 Media reported that CBP has been purchasing location data from the online advertising ecosystem — data originally collected through consumer apps including video games, dating services, and fitness trackers — to track phone movements over time. ICE has purchased similar ad-tech surveillance tools, with the capacity to monitor phone movements across entire neighborhoods. The commercial data infrastructure built to sell you running shoes now feeds the deportation pipeline.
The targeting system is Palantir. The surveillance, location, and detention system is GEO. The data layer extends into every app on your phone. Together, they form the closed loop.
The Personnel
If the system were just contracts, it could be canceled. But the executives who built the system now run the agencies that award the contracts.
Tom Homan — Border Czar and de facto commander of immigration enforcement — received more than $5,000 in consulting fees from GEO Care according to his February 2025 ethics disclosure. The $5,000 figure is the disclosure threshold, meaning the actual amount could be far higher.
Homan joined the Border Patrol in 1984. He rose through ICE. He implemented family separation under Trump 1.0. He left for the private sector, consulted for GEO, then returned to command the entire enforcement apparatus.
The FBI recorded Homan accepting $50,000 in cash during a sting operation. The DOJ ended the investigation, concluding there was “no credible evidence” of criminal wrongdoing.
The other two positions represent different faces of the same capture. Pam Bondi — Attorney General — lobbied for GEO Group through Ballard Partners in 2019. Her DOJ prosecutes immigration cases; her former client profits from every person those courts order detained. In July 2025, she fired the Director of DOJ’s Ethics Office — the person who would have advised on recusals from former clients like GEO. Kristi Noem — DHS Secretary until today — oversaw all GEO and ICE contracts from the other side: awarding the money Bondi’s DOJ feeds into. In January 2026, Chief U.S. District Judge Patrick Schiltz — a conservative Scalia protégé — found that ICE had violated 96 court orders in a single month under Noem’s watch. She spent $300 million in border security funds on a luxury jet fleet and $220 million on ads featuring herself. She called two U.S. citizens shot dead by federal agents “domestic terrorists“ and refused to retract it under oath. Trump removed her today. Her replacement, Sen. Markwayne Mullin, inherits every contract, every facility, and every dollar documented in this series. Bondi remains.
George Zoley — GEO Group Executive Chairman — made political contributions exceeding $1 million from 2021 through 2025, including to PACs affiliated with Trump. The GEO Group PAC donated more than $280,000 to current members of Congress.
The revolving door isn’t a metaphor. The private prison executive paid the politicians. The politicians appointed the consultants. The consultants award the contracts. The contracts fund the campaign contributions.
The Death Toll
While GEO reports earnings to Wall Street, people die in its facilities.
2025 saw 32 deaths in ICE detention — the highest since 2004, nearly tripling the 11 deaths in 2024. At least six more died in early 2026.
In December 2025, four immigrants died in four days. Three were in GEO Group facilities.
At Camp East Montana — now the nation’s largest detention center — the El Paso County Medical Examiner ruled the death of Geraldo Lunas Campos, a 55-year-old Cuban national, a homicide: asphyxia due to neck and torso compression while being physically restrained by law enforcement. ICE’s initial statement said he “experienced medical distress.”
Of the 38 people who have died in ICE custody since January 2025, 71% were held in for-profit facilities.
In October 2025, ICE halted payments to all third-party medical providers — including dialysis, prenatal care, and chemotherapy — after the VA terminated its role processing reimbursement claims. ICE posted a notice stating it would not begin processing claims until at least April 30, 2026, even as the detained population broke records above 70,000.
The closed loop generates bodies. The bodies generate revenue. The revenue generates political contributions. The contributions generate contracts. The contracts generate bodies.
Capturing the State
When civil society tried to impose consequences, GEO captured the regulatory apparatus.
In 2019, seven major banks announced they would no longer finance private prisons — cutting off over 70% of GEO’s available financing. Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, and others said the human rights risks were too high.
GEO’s response: spend $3.3 million lobbying Congress in 2025 for the Fair Access to Banking Act, which would legally compel banks to serve private prison companies. Trump signed an executive order empowering regulators to punish “politicized debanking.”
In June 2025, Bank of America reinstated CoreCivic as a client.
When markets impose accountability, you capture the legislature.
When advocacy groups threaten legal challenges, you capture the executive. On September 25, 2025, Trump signed NSPM-7, directing Joint Terrorism Task Forces to investigate “ideological extremism” regarding immigration — targeting the funding networks of nonprofits and legal aid organizations that challenge enforcement operations. The same pattern: an external check threatens the loop, so the loop absorbs the power to neutralize the check. Banks cut off financing — GEO captured Congress to force them back. Advocates filed injunctions — the White House authorized terrorism investigations of their donors.
The Economics
The closed loop is profitable at every stage.
Surveillance revenue (BI Incorporated):
SmartLINK monitoring: $4.12 per person per day
182,000 people monitored = $750,000+ per day
Skip tracing revenue (BI Incorporated):
$121 million contract (December 2025)
Bonus incentives for speed and volume
Detention revenue (GEO Group facilities):
$150-200 per person per day
75,000 beds
Total GEO Group consolidated revenue (2025): $2.63 billion — including detention, surveillance, reentry, and international operations. Adjusted EBITDA (2025): $464 million
The more people surveilled, the more flagged for non-compliance. The more flagged, the more hunted. The more hunted, the more detained. The more detained, the more revenue.
Growth is built into the model.
The Contractor Network
GEO isn’t alone. CoreCivic — the other major private prison company — saw its ICE revenue double in 2025. A network of shell companies and newly created aviation firms won billions in deportation and detention contracts. (For the full contractor breakdown and the fiscal architecture that funds them, see Part 4: The $165 Billion Machine.)
The concentration is accelerating. Nearly 70% of ICE’s $5.4 billion in contract spending now flows to just ten companies — Palantir, CSI Aviation, GEO Group, CoreCivic, and a handful of others. The system isn’t diversifying. It’s consolidating.
The pattern across all of them: create companies, win contracts, deliver people to the detention system. The closed loop isn’t just GEO — it’s an industry.
The Parallel to History
In 1963, George Wackenhut told Newsweek: “Our files make us useful to business people with problems.”
The problems were usually unions, civil rights activists, or suspected leftists. The files were dossiers compiled without legal authority or oversight.
In 2026, GEO Group tells investors it can “scale up to serve millions.”
The millions are immigrants. The files are digital. The surveillance infrastructure that once held files on four million names now tracks 182,000 people through their phones — and the company says it can scale to millions more.
The only thing that changed was the technology.
What Closed Loop Means
A closed loop is a system where outputs become inputs.
Revenue from detention funds political contributions. Political contributions secure contracts. Contracts enable surveillance. Surveillance generates arrest targets. Arrests fill detention beds. Detention generates revenue.
The system feeds itself.
Breaking the loop would require:
Ending for-profit detention
Separating surveillance from detention contractors
Prohibiting contractor personnel from government positions
Enforcing recusal requirements for former lobbyists
Restoring banking sector freedom to refuse private prison clients
Defunding NSPM-7 terrorism investigations of advocacy groups
None of those are happening.
The February 2026 earnings call projected $800 million to $1 billion in additional annual revenue. Wall Street’s only complaint was that detention wasn’t expanding fast enough.
The Question
George Zoley proposed what became Wackenhut Corrections in 1984.
Tom Homan joined the Border Patrol the same year.
For forty years, they built parallel institutions: one private, one public. One profitable, one powerful. Now they’ve merged.
The private prison executive tells investors the “alien population” is 16.8 million and his company can monitor millions. The Border Patrol veteran commands the enforcement apparatus that fills the beds. The Attorney General who lobbied for the company now oversees its contracts. The Secretary who presided over 96 court violations in a single month was fired today — and her replacement inherits every contract, every dollar, every bed.
This isn’t corruption in the traditional sense — bribes, kickbacks, backroom deals. This is structural capture. The private interest and the public authority have become the same thing.
The closed loop is complete.
And the loop has an answer for the people who try to break it. The banks that cut off financing were forced back by legislation GEO helped write. The advocacy groups that filed injunctions are now targets of terrorism investigations under NSPM-7. The journalists and legal observers who document what happens inside are being tracked by the same surveillance infrastructure that tracks the detained — identified by facial recognition, cataloged in an internal database called the “Agitator chat,” visited at home by federal agents who know their names and addresses.
The system doesn’t just generate profit from human suffering. It generates the tools to silence anyone who says so.
Series: After the Arrest
This is Part 5 of a 7-part series tracing what happens after ICE operations disappear from the cameras.
Autopsy Shopping — One came back homicide. The next body went somewhere else.
1,500 Miles in 24 Hours — The transfer system that turns an arrest into a disappearance
The Tent City and the Warehouse — Inside the facilities America is building to hold 135,000 people
The $165 Billion Machine — How Congress cut student loans to fund detention
The Closed Loop — One company monitors, hunts, and detains ← You are here
The Darkness — The system wasn’t designed to fail oversight. It was designed to exist without it.
Making It Visible — The journalists, whistleblowers, and communities forcing the system into the light
What We Don’t Know Yet
SmartLINK failure rate. GEO reports 182,000 people monitored, but the rate of non-compliance flags caused by technical failures — app glitches, phone battery deaths, GPS drift — versus actual absconding has never been independently audited. If the false-positive rate is high, the loop generates arrests from system errors.
Skip-tracing pipeline numbers. BI’s $121 million contract includes volume bonuses, but ICE has not disclosed how many people have been located and arrested through the full closed-loop pipeline (SmartLINK flag → BI skip trace → ICE arrest → GEO detention). The number would quantify the loop’s actual throughput.
GEO segment revenue. The $2.63 billion consolidated figure includes detention, surveillance, reentry, and international operations. GEO’s 10-K filing contains segment breakdowns, but the company does not disclose how much revenue BI Incorporated generates separately from monitoring versus skip tracing.
Vertical integration review. No federal agency or congressional committee has formally examined whether GEO’s ownership of surveillance, location, and detention functions creates conflicts of interest or perverse incentives. The antitrust implications of a single contractor controlling the full pipeline have not been assessed.
Per-diem detention rates. The $150-200 per person per day range cited in reporting is wide. Actual per-diem rates vary by facility type, contract terms, and guaranteed minimum payments. The specific rates at facilities like Camp East Montana — built under emergency contracts with less competitive bidding — have not been publicly disclosed.
Sources
GEO Group Financial
Bloomberg: “ICE Bounty Hunting Push Aided by GEO Group’s Surveillance Work” (February 4, 2026)
The Marshall Project: “Why GEO Group, CoreCivic Stock Prices Fell in 2025” (January 6, 2026)
GEO Group: Q4 and Full Year 2025 Earnings Release (February 11, 2026)
GEO Group: Q4 2024 Earnings Call Transcript — “unprecedented opportunity” quote (February 27, 2025)
GEO Group: Confidential Investor Presentation — 16.8 million “alien population” figure (December 2025)
BI Incorporated / Skip Tracing
The Intercept: “ICE Hires Immigrant Bounty Hunters From Private Prison Company GEO Group” — Sam Biddle (December 19, 2025)
The Jersey Vindicator: “ICE taps GEO Group subsidiary to track immigrants in $121 million deal” (January 14, 2026)
Palantir, ImmigrationOS, and Surveillance Technology
American Immigration Council: “ICE to Use ImmigrationOS by Palantir” (April 2025)
Axios: “ICE pays Palantir $30M to build new tool to track and deport immigrants” (May 1, 2025)
Senate Finance Committee: Wyden, Ocasio-Cortez Demand Answers from Palantir About Plans to Build IRS Mega-Database (June 17, 2025)
Mother Jones: “A Knock on the Window and a Glimpse of America’s Surveillance Future” — $1 billion Palantir deal and ELITE tool (March 4, 2026)
404 Media: “CBP Tapped Into the Online Advertising Ecosystem To Track Peoples’ Movements” (March 3, 2026)
404 Media: “Lawmakers Demand DHS Define ‘Domestic Terrorist’ As It Uses Vast Array of Surveillance Tools” — ELITE confidence scoring (February 27, 2026)
Shane Harris: “Killer App” — Washingtonian (January 31, 2012) — Poindexter meeting with Palantir founders
Wackenhut History
SPY Magazine: “Inside America’s Scariest Security Company” — John Connolly (September 1992)
Washington Post: “Detective Firm Says It Uses Right-Wing Group’s Data” (January 27, 1977)
Wikipedia: George Wackenhut — documented history of 4 million files
Frank Donner: The Age of Surveillance — detailed Wackenhut dossier operations
Personnel Ethics and Court Orders
Washington Post: “Trump’s border czar consulted for immigrant detention firm GEO Group” (May 27, 2025)
ABC News: “DOJ ended probe into border czar Tom Homan allegedly accepting $50K in FBI sting” (2025)
Ballard Partners lobbying records: Pam Bondi/GEO Group (2019)
NPR: “Judge says ICE has violated 96 court orders this month in Minnesota” (January 31, 2026)
Bloomberg Law: “ICE Blasted by Minneapolis Judge for Violating Scores of Orders” (January 28, 2026)
Banking Legislation
The Intercept: “ICE’s Private Prison Contractors Spent Millions Lobbying to Force Banks to Give Them Loans” (February 5, 2026)
Detention Deaths and Medical Care
Axios: “ICE custody deaths reach highest peak in two decades” (January 20, 2026)
Andrew Free: Data on deaths in for-profit facilities (February 2026)
Popular Information: “ICE has stopped paying for detainee medical treatment” — Judd Legum (2025)
CBS News: “ICE stopped paying for detainee medical care as population surged” (2025)
NSPM-7
White House: NSPM-7 — Protecting the American People Against Invasion (September 25, 2025)
For the series documenting how this enforcement apparatus was built, see The Gamergate Army Gets Badges and Guns.