8 NOVEMBER 20-26, 2025 westword.com WESTWORD | MUSIC | CAFE | CULTURE | NIGHT+DAY | NEWS | LETTERS | CONTENTS | The Hard Cell THE SUPREME COURT TAKES UP ANOTHER COLORADO CASE...THIS ONE INVOLVING THE GEO GROUP AND ITS AURORA DETENTION CENTER. BY BENNITO L. KELT Y One of the largest private prison companies in the world, the GEO Group, is tied up in a Supreme Court battle as the company gains attention for contracts with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. That case started in Aurora, which has played a key role in President Donald Trump’s mass deportation plan in more ways than one. The GEO Group operates the Aurora Immigrant Processing Center, where ICE sends detainees facing deportation. The Florida-based company operates more than fi fty similar facilities in the United States and abroad, managing more than 60,000 prison- ers worldwide. It has a market value of about $2.4 billion and, at times, has ranked as the largest private prison company in the world, jostling with fellow U.S. federal contractor CoreCivic over the years. On November 10, U.S. Supreme Court justices heard arguments in the case Meno- cal v. the GEO Group, which involves what kind of legal immunity the GEO Group has under federal prison contracts. In 2014, Alejandro Menocal, a Mexican immigrant who lived in Golden before his ar- rest, worked in a dollar-a-day work program at the Aurora ICE facility while awaiting his deportation. Menocal was able to resolve his immigration case and stay in the U.S., but he wasn’t happy about the work program, alleging that the GEO Group underpaid him according to the state’s minimum wage laws, and violated forced labor and traffi cking laws by threatening him and other inmates with solitary confi nement for not doing tasks for free. In October 2014, other detainees from the Aurora facility signed onto a class-action lawsuit brought by Menocal against the GEO Group in the U.S. District Court of Colorado. The GEO Group has argued that it is im- mune from the lawsuit because the company contracts with the federal government, and was only following ICE’s detailed instruc- tions for how to handle detainees. In 2015, a district court judge ruled that the GEO Group was not immune from the lawsuit, but claims that Menocal and others were underpaid were dismissed. The GEO Group still had to defend against alleged traf- fi cking and forced labor violations, however. No fi nal ruling on the case has been made during the decade it has been in court, largely because the GEO Group filed motions raising questions about what specifi c powers federal contractors have. In January, the Supreme Court agreed to hear Menocal v. the GEO Group, based on a petition fi led by the GEO Group. Justices are now weighing the question of whether federal contractors can fi le an immediate appeal to lawsuits. An immediate appeal challenges a court ruling before the case is concluded, as opposed to most appeals, which occur afterward. In this case, the GEO Group wants to appeal the district court’s decision to deny its immunity. The company has already lost huge sums in lawsuits in other states over the same dollar- a-day work program. As the case goes through the Su- preme Court, here are seven things to know about the GEO Group: Three years later, the WCC secured its fi rst contract: a deal to design, build and manage an immigrant detention center for Immigration and Naturalization Services in the city of Aurora, Colorado, according to the GEO Group. The facility opened in May 1987. In 2003, the WCC changed its name to the GEO Group as part of a deal by the Wackenhut Corporation to reacquire a large share of the company. The GEO Group has been operating in Aurora for nearly forty years, but the com- pany has made more headlines since Trump returned to offi ce in January. After Trump touted his mass deportation plan, which he dubbed “Operation Aurora” while on the campaign trail in Colorado in October 2024, the GEO Group has been busy invest- ing $70 million to expand the Aurora facility in order to house upwards of 1,400 people at a time instead of the 300 it had usually held. According to Latino advocacy groups, ICE’s raids in Colorado have been among the largest in the country. ICE Relies on the GEO Group to Keep Immigrants Detained ICE arrests immigrants and deports them, but the GEO Group handles the middle step of keeping them detained while ICE secures a removal order from a judge. Despite the Aurora facility’s name, only about one or two ICE agents are inside the complex at a time, according to the federal agency. Although ICE denies entry to certain offi cials and outlines how the GEO Group should treat its detainees, most of the inside operations are handled by the GEO Group. ICE has detained more than 60,000 people in the U.S. and hopes to increase its detention capacity to 100,000, according to reporting by the Washington Post. For Trump’s mass deportation to work, ICE needs places to put a city’s worth of detained immigrants behind bars while initiating removal proceedings in immigration court, a process that can be stalled at times. According to reports, the Trump ad- ministration plans to open three new ICE detention facilities in the Colorado cities of Hudson, Walsenburg and Ignacio. Mem- bers of this state’s congressional delegation have confi rmed that the GEO Group will likely reopen the private prison in Hudson, in northeastern Colorado, that held state prisoners from Alaska from 2009 to 2014. From 1997 to 2010, rival CoreCivic oper- ated the facility that ICE is expected to use in Walsenburg. The two facilities would be about the size of Aurora’s ICE detention center, with between 1,100 to 1,400 beds. Ignacio is on the Southern Ute Reserva- tion; the tribe released a statement in August that it had no agreement with ICE to allow a new detention facility. The GEO Group Offers a “Turnkey” Suite of Detention Services On the GEO Group’s website, the company says it offers “turnkey solutions” for incar- ceration. Ironically, “turnkey” is a seven- teenth-century English term for jailer, but the GEO Group uses it to convey that it does everything needed from the ground up. The company boasts that it doesn’t just provide the detention center guards: The company designs the facility, fi nances it, builds it, cleans it, transports the inmates, feeds them and sets up any classes or work programs required inside. The GEO Group also offers services for people who are out of detention but still under supervision, like electronic tracking devices made by BI Incorporated, a Boulder- based company. The GEO Group operates nonresidential and residential re-entry centers, sometimes called halfway houses, which are supervised housing or work pro- grams for people leaving incarceration. ICE Contracted with the GEO Group After Its Own Name Change The GEO Group has been running the Aurora facility since 1987, but the contract moved from the INS to ICE in 2004, less than a year after Congress bumped ICE from being a post-9/11 bureau to a partial replacement for the INS. The INS had been around since 1933, and references to it often pop up in older TV shows and fi lms, like in 1993’s Coneheads, in which INS agents are the main villains. The INS was the country’s primary immigration enforcement arm for seventy years. Along with the Border Patrol, the INS led some of the largest deportation efforts in the U.S., like Operation Wetback. After 9/11, the U.S. cre- ated the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and removed the INS, which was a part of the Justice Department, entirely. The DHS was broadly put in charge of protecting U.S. soil and borders, with agen- cies like FEMA, the Secret Service and the Coast Guard stuffed into it. The INS’s re- sponsibilities were split among three agen- cies: Border Patrol (which had been around longer than the INS), Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and ICE. While the Border Patrol is charged with making sure that no one crosses borders il- legally and CBP with making sure nothing dangerous gets through legal entryways, NEWS KEEP UP ON DENVER NEWS AT WESTWORD.COM/NEWS The GEO Group manages the Aurora ICE facility, as well as dozens more across the country. BENNITO L. KELT Y
