GEO Group, one of the largest private prison operators, said President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown eventually will fill up detention facilities and force the government to use more electronic systems to track noncitizens it wants to deport.
The company, which runs the Northwest ICE Processing Center in Tacoma, predicted the number of people electronically monitored by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement will climb to 465,000 over the next two years, up from 181,000. Ankle bracelets and other such monitors are GEO’s highest-margin business.
GEO also announced its BI Inc. unit secured a two-year contract worth as much as $1 billion to manage ICE’s Intensive Supervision Appearance Program, which uses GPS tracking, routine check-ins and other tools to keep tabs on immigrants outside of detention centers who are facing court proceedings.
“Once they max out that capacity, and they continue the enforcement efforts that they have, the next logical tool to use is the ISAP program,” GEO Chief Financial Officer Mark Suchinski told analysts on a conference call Thursday.
For years, ICE has outsourced work to private detention centers, processing facilities, security contractors and airlines. Demand for those services are up since Trump promised the biggest mass deportations in U.S. history and earmarked $45 billion to expand immigration detention space. GEO shares doubled in the month after Trump was elected last year.
While the number of immigrants being held has increased, it hasn’t risen as fast as some expected. GEO cut its 2025 earnings forecast on Thursday, sending the shares to their biggest drop in three months and down 45% this year. Detentions have been slowed by the government shutdown and ICE having difficulty in hiring 10,000 new immigration agents, the company said.
But GEO said the arrests will keep going up, eventually putting a strain on the system. There are almost 60,000 people being held in ICE detention facilities, according to the most recently available government data, and the Trump administration has said it would like to increase that to 100,000.
The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, has been looking for alternatives to the rising cost of long-term contracts with private-run detention facilities, Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement. She didn’t specifically respond to a question about whether electronic monitoring would be among the cost-saving measures.
GEO Group executives told investors the company was continuing to win detention contracts, increasing its own population of ICE detainees to a record 22,000. But the company also is preparing for more aggressive monitoring of nondetained people whom ICE described as “those released from agency custody with final orders of removal, those who are pending removal proceedings, and unaccompanied children.”
The population of nondetained people with existing court cases has increased rapidly since 2020, reaching more than 7.6 million at the end of fiscal year 2024, according to ICE. Of those, 181,000 people are currently under some kind of electronic monitoring program, referred to by ICE as Alternatives To Detention, or ATD, which can range from wearing ankle monitors to checking in with a location on a smartphone.
GEO executives told investors the ISAP contract estimates the ATD population will double in a year, and grow to more than 465,000 people in the following year.
“There’s millions of people that are on the nondetained docket, and there’s going to be a desire to provide more clarity as to where they are, what stage they are in with respect to their hearing process, and making sure they get to their hearing, and if they’re not qualified to be in the country, to deport them,” CEO George Zoley told analysts. “Those are all publicly identified objectives of this administration, and I think the ISAP contract will be an important tool toward those objectives.”
According to the government, the majority of the ATD population — 147,000 — are on a smartphone-based monitoring system called SmartLINK, which is also owned by GEO Group. An additional 30,000 people are being tracked by ankle monitors.
The phone system costs ICE less than a dollar a day while ankle monitors are more than $2. But GEO executives said the government will likely lean more heavily on the ankle monitors in the future, based on recent trends and conversations with ICE.
GEO Group executives said the company had been on an ankle monitor buying spree, and they believe they currently possess more units than any other company. One of the main competitors in the electronic monitoring business in the U.S. is CoreCivic Inc.
Alternatives to detention have been used for decades, starting under President George W. Bush. The program has expanded over the years to include GPS tracking devices such as ankle bracelets and limited-function smartphones. During the Biden administration ICE expanded the use of smartphones that would allow migrants to call 911 and communicate with ICE and use the agency’s tracking app.
When asked on the earnings call how high the total tracked population could go, GEO Group executives were bullish.
“I don’t know. How high is high?” Zoley asked rhetorically. “We’re the largest monitoring company in the world.”
Bloomberg’s Alicia A. Caldwell and Sarah McGregor contributed.