9 NOVEMBER 20-26, 2025 westword.com WESTWORD | CONTENTS | LETTERS | NEWS | NIGHT+DAY | CULTURE | CAFE | MUSIC | ICE handles the immigrants already in the country. ICE was largely seen as the succes- sor to the INS, and the main source of the country’s immigration enforcement agents. ICE now has a $45 billion annual budget after it was allocated more money in Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill, which includes funds to build more detention facilities. The GEO Group Is No Stranger to Lawsuits For the past few decades, the GEO Group has been a consistent target of lawsuits and has spent millions on settlements. The federal government sued the com- pany in 2010 over claims that male managers sexually harassed female employees at a prison in Arizona, resulting in a $140,000 settlement by the GEO Group in 2013, and then another $60,000 payment three years later to settle another claim in the same case. Then, the GEO Group paid $550,000 to comply with a consent decree that resulted from more claims involving the same sexual harassment suit, known as EEOC and ACRD v. the GEO Group. In 2015, the GEO Group paid $50,000 to settle a First Amendment case brought by Prison Legal News, which claimed the company censored its coverage of the New Castle Correctional Facility in Indiana. In 2017, Iranian immigrant Kamyar Samimi died in the Aurora ICE facility after being cut off from methadone. The ACLU of Colorado sued the GEO Group for wrongful death, re- sulting in a confi dential settlement between the GEO Group and Samimi’s family in 2020. In 2021, a federal jury ordered the GEO Group to pay $17 million in back wages to detainees at a Tacoma ICE facility for the same dollar-a-day program involved in the Aurora case. An appellate court upheld that ruling in January and increased the payout to $23 million. In 2022, Nicaraguan immigrant Melvin Ariel Calero Mendoza died in the Aurora ICE facility from a pulmonary embolism. Two years later, his family fi led a wrongful death suit, which is still ongoing. In July, Congressman Jason Crow sued the Trump administration and DHS after being denied entry to the Aurora ICE facility. That lawsuit is ongoing, but the GEO Group isn’t liable in that case. The GEO Group Operates Prisons in Australia, South Africa The GEO Group operates three prisons abroad: two in Australia and one in South Africa. The Fulham and Ravenhall correctional centers in Australia, both in the southeastern state of Victoria, are medium-security male prisons. Ravenhall, located next to Mel- bourne, can hold about 1,300 people, making it one of the largest correctional centers in that country. Fulham holds about 900 people and is further east, in a more rural area. In South Africa, the GEO Group co-runs the Kutama Sinthumule Correctional Center, a 3,000-bed maximum-security male prison. In this public-private partnership, the GEO Group helped build and manage the facility, which is publicly owned and located in a rural northeastern part of the country. A riot broke out there in 2023, and a major fi re led to a partial shutdown. The Geo Group’s three international de- tention facilities handle criminal offenders incarcerated in their own countries. State- side, most of the detention facilities that the GEO Group manages are for immigrants fac- ing deportation, who haven’t been criminally charged by the U.S. These immigrants might face charges in their own country, but they’re held in facilities like the Aurora detention center for civil immigration violations. Un- like the detention centers in the U.S., none of the international facilities hold women. Just a few days before Jeanette Vizguer- ra’s arrest in mid-March, ICE arrested Co- lumbia University student Mahmoud Khalil in New York and then transferred him to a GEO Group detention center in Louisiana. Khalil’s arrest drew international attention because he was a leader in pro-Palestine pro- tests the previous year. Khalil was released by a federal judge’s ruling in June. Activist Alfredo “Lelo” Juarez Zeferino was arrested in June; his supporters say he was arrested because he’s a prominent farmworker organizer. Sent to a facility run by the GEO Group, he chose to return to Mexico soon after. Meanwhile, Vizguerra remains behind bars in the GEO Group’s Aurora ICE facility. Email the author at [email protected]. The GEO Group’s actions in Aurora are the focus of a Supreme Court case. BENNITO L. KELT Y
