GEO Group CEO calls Litigation Against ICE Jails “Unprecedented” and “Unconstitutional”
On GEO Group's quarterly earnings call, GEO Group CEO George Zoley Says the "warehouse project has been paused."
On today’s quarterly earnings call, GEO Group CEO George Zoley called litigation against immigration jails “unprecedented” and “unconstitutional.”
The remarks came during the question and answer section of the call. During his prepared remarks, Zoley had said that the federal government is considering buying “approximately 10 privately owned turn-key ICE processing centers.”
“I can respectfully acknowledge that we have been in discussions with ICE regarding the potential sale of multiple facilities,” he said.
This announcement prompted a participant to ask: “Why do they want to own the facilities rather than contract with third parties?”
Zoley replied that if the federal government owns the facilities, “there are more protections from unwarranted litigation that infringes upon the activities of the ICE processing centers.”
“There’s been litigation regarding overseeing medical services, food services, general cleanliness, etc,” he said. “It’s really unprecedented [and] I believe it’s fundamentally unconstitutional.”
He continued:
“As some blue states are considering more active involvement in oversight of facilities, I think the logical solution to much of that is federal ownership of the facilities. They are federal facilities to begin with in my opinion, it’s the federal government who’s paying for the operations of the facilities, but the ownership of the buildings will provide stronger credibility in the courts as to the Supremacy Clause in the Constitution that these are federal facilities and and they are carrying out the congressional priorities of the immigration programs and policies that Congress has passed and that states can only have very limited involvement in those policies and programs.”
Zoley said that “the warehouse project has been paused, and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is evaluating how to proceed with this initiative to increase and consolidate the detention capacity.”
“I think they’re [DHS] starting to look at the price tags of each of the facilities and doing comparisons as to whether the existing turnkey facilities may be a better play, financially, operationally, so forth, than some of these other locations, which have been politically problematic,” he said. “All of the plans, I think, are being reviewed, assessed, and I’m sure they’ll come up with some reasonable conclusions.”
More than one-third of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detainees are imprisoned in GEO Group jails.
For the first quarter of 2026, GEO Group reported total revenues of $705.2 million, a 17 percent increase from the first quarter 2025. Despite the growing revenue, GEO Group is still carrying over a billion dollars in debt. An investigation by The Appeal revealed that, from 2021 through 2025, GEO Group executive chairman George Zoley made political contributions totaling more than a million dollars, including donations to the Republican National Committee and to PACs affiliated with President Donald Trump.
“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 on today’s call.