In February 2013, the GEO Group's private foundation pledged US$6 million to company founder George Zoley's alma mater, Florida Atlantic University (FAU) (Zoley was also onetime Chair of the FAU Board of Trustees). In return, the GEO Group received naming rights to the university's football stadium. In April, after pressure from students, faculty, and alumni, GEO Group withdrew the gift. The GEO Group's Executive Vice President Adam Hasner then became President of FAU in 2025.
Public relations firm Edelman supported GEO Group and was characterized by one source as helping in "laundering the reputation of private US concentration camps" in July 2019. In May 2019, The New York Times reported that executives from the Washington, D.C., office, including office president Lisa Ross and former Trump White House deputy press secretary, Lindsay Walters, traveled to Florida to present the pitch.
In terminating California's contract with GEO's Central Valley Modified Community Correctional Facility in McFarland, Governor Gavin Newsom said that this was a step intended to, "end the outrage of private prisons once and for all". Newsom further stated: "Private, for-profit prisons have been used for many years to help the state overcome prison overcrowding challenges, but it is time to end our reliance on them".
In November 2018, CalSTRS, the $220 billion-dollar California teachers pension fund, voted to divest from GEO Group and CoreCivic because of concerns expressed by teachers in the Bay Area. In November 2019, CalPERS, the $370 billion public employee pension fund, quietly divested from GEO Group and CoreCivic, as well. CalSTRS and CalPERS constitute the largest public pension funds in the United States. Both divestment campaigns were led by Emily Claire Goldman of Educators for Migrant Justice, a non-profit organization targeting public pension funds that it says are "aiding and abetting the administration's egregious abuses of migrant families, children, and asylum seekers".
A predominantly Jewish organization called Never Again, as part of demonstrations held around the U.S., protested outside GEO Group's Century City headquarters on August 5, 2019, shutting down the building for five hours, hoisting a banner characterizing ICE facilities as "concentration camps", and refusing to leave the lobby, resulting in the arrest of several activists.
Several prison riots occurred in the mid-to-late 2000s. On April 24, 2007, inmates rioted for two hours at the GEO Group's state-owned New Castle Correctional Facility in Indiana. The riot resulted in fires and minor injuries to staff and inmates. The Indiana Department of Correction concluded that its recent transfer of 600 inmates over six weeks from Arizona to a new section at New Castle increased tensions at the facility, as the inmates comprised a large group and prison staff lacked experience. The department held the inmates responsible for the riot. Following the riot, Indiana authorities suspended further transfers of Arizona inmates, pending measures to help out-of-state inmates adjust to Indiana prison policies, and to ensure that inmates were transferred more gradually to be able to integrate them into the prison population at New Castle. In 2008 and 2009, prisoners at the Reeves County Detention Complex in Texas, the largest privately owned prison in the United States, rioted over poor conditions. The complex housed more than 3700 prisoners, mostly immigrants serving short sentences prior to deportation. They caused damages of $1 million and $21 million, respectively, as the second riot resulted in a severe fire.
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On July 9, 2017, a facility-wide, eight-hour riot broke out in GEO Group's Great Plains Correctional Facility in Hinton, Oklahoma. Four hundred of the 1,940 federal inmates refused to leave the recreation yards and took control of a building. Three guards suffered injuries and two were taken hostage. Regaining control required the intervention of eight law enforcement agencies to secure the perimeter to prevent escapes, including the Caddo and Canadian County Sheriffs' deputies, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the Oklahoma Highway Patrol, and the Hinton, Hydro, Geary, and Binger, Oklahoma, police departments," as well as GEO's Correctional Emergency Response Team members from its Lawton, Oklahoma, prison, 70 miles south. Tear gas and pepper spray were employed to regain control of the prison.
On June 12, 2025, following days of Delaney Hall detainees complaining about unacceptable conditions and lack of food, a small uprising occurred and four people escaped the facility, after breaking through a sheet-rock interior wall. Following the unrest, around 50 women were transferred from Delaney Hall to El Paso, Texas, where they were held in a tent-like facility opened in 2023.
2000s
In 2001, an inmate was murdered at GEO's Willacy County State Jail in Texas by two other inmates. The inmate's family sued GEO in 2006, resulting in a finding of liability of $47.5 million for destruction of evidence and negligently causing the man's death. In 2009, GEO appealed the court's decision; the appeals court reduced the damages to $42.5 million.
Between 2005 and 2009, at least eight people died at the GEO Group-operated George W. Hill Correctional Facility, Pennsylvania's only privately-run jail. Family members then filed lawsuits against the company and facility, alleging that it did not provide adequate medical care or proper supervision for offenders. GEO withdrew from operating the facility on December 31, 2008, "citing underperformance and frequent litigations". As of 2018, GEO is again managing this facility.
In 2007, the Texas Youth Commission (TYC) fired seven employees responsible for monitoring prison conditions after discovering that the GEO Group-run Coke County Juvenile Justice Center had "deplorable conditions". The seven employees had earlier worked directly for GEO. They had failed to report problems at the county facility, but an inspection by the TYC found the facility to be understaffed, ill-managed, and unsanitary. The TYC ordered that all inmates be transferred elsewhere, terminated their state contract with GEO, and subsequently closed the facility. GEO had run the facility since 1994.
2010s
In February 2012, GEO Group and Mississippi state authorities settled a class-action suit was that had been filed in 2010 against state authorities and GEO over conditions at the Walnut Grove Youth Correctional Facility in Mississippi, the largest juvenile facility in the United States. The settlement required the state to end its contract with GEO, and put operations at the facility under a federal court monitor. The state transferred juvenile offenders to state-run facilities, and the company additionally lost contracts for operating two other prisons in Mississippi.
In July 2012, two undocumented immigrants in Florida turned themselves in to police in order to get themselves placed in the Broward Transitional Center, which was holding immigration detainees, It is the only privately owned immigration detention center in Florida. assertedly to report on conditions inside the facility, as accounts in the immigrant community alleged substandard conditions. The pair alleged "substandard or callous medical care, including a woman taken for ovarian surgery and returned the same day, still bleeding, to her cell, and a man who urinated blood for days but was not taken to see a doctor". In September 2012, U.S. Congressman Ted Deutch of Pompano Beach wrote a letter to ICE regarding the contract under which GEO operates the facility, requesting a case-by-case investigation. Twenty-five other congressional representatives signed on to the inquiry. (Ultimately, in January 2013, Deutch received a reply that he found unsatisfactory.)
A 2014 lawsuit filed on behalf of nine immigrant plaintiffs in Denver, Colorado, alleged they were threatened with solitary confinement if they refused to work without pay. Not having been convicted of a crime, they asserted that they could not be required to work like convicts in prison. This eventually grew into a March 2017 class-action lawsuit alleging violations of the U.S. Constitution and federal antislavery laws with respect to 60,000 current and former immigrant detainees at the Denver Contract Detention Facility based in Aurora, Colorado. The suit alleged that the detainees were made to work for less than a dollar a day or for nothing at all. On December 2, 2017, 64-year-old Kamyar Samimi, who had come to the U.S. in 1976, was taken into ICE custody at his home due to his having been arrested for a minor drug offense in 2005. He was imprisoned at the Aurora contract facility, where he died 16 days later from cardiac arrest. In 2012, Evalin-Ali Mandza died of cardiac arrest at the same detention center. An investigation of Mandza's death found GEO employees did not know how to use an EKG machine and procrastinated in calling an ambulance. In 2019, the Denver City Council voted to terminate a $10 million contract with GEO and CoreCivic, but later temporarily extended those contracts, and in 2022 approved a new $1.5 million contract for GEO Group to provide electronic monitoring equipment for the city.
In September 2017, Washington State Attorney General Bob Ferguson sued GEO Group for not paying immigrant detainees the state's $11 hourly minimum wage, characterizing the detainees as "a captive population of vulnerable individuals who cannot easily advocate for themselves". The corporation was paying detainees with snacks or $1 per day for their labor which provided all the non-security employment at its Northwest Detention Center, a facility in Tacoma, Washington. In 2021, a Seattle jury found for the detainees, setting compensation for them in the amount of $17.3 million, with U.S. District Judge Robert Jensen Bryan ordering an additional $5.9 million to be paid to the state of Washington, bringing the total to $23.2 million.
In 2018, two Florida employees of Behavioral Intervention Inc., a GEO subsidiary, were arrested for taking bribes of up to $5,000 to have electronic monitoring devices removed from immigrants who were allowed to remain free on bail if they wore the monitors. Elisa Pelaez was sentenced to thirty-three months in federal prison, and others were set to be sentenced later in the year. In December 2019, 13 fathers in Texas sued the company alleging family separation. Due to the controversies surrounding mass incarceration of immigrants in private for-profit detention centers, several banks, including Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and JPMorgan Chase, announced that they would no longer offer lines of credit and term loans to the companies involved.
2020s
In March 2023, a class-action lawsuit was filed against GEO Group by the Social Justice Legal Foundation, alleging that GEO Group engaged in a "months-long poisoning" of more than 1,300 detainees at the Adelanto Detention Center in San Bernardino County, California, by improperly spraying a cleaning agent known as HDQ Neutral in poorly ventilated areas from February 2020 to April 2021 during the COVID-19 pandemic.
In June 2024, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) filed an administrative complaint against GEO Group, alleging that GEO Group used a disinfectant known as Halt without proper protections at its Adelanto Detention Center more than 1,000 times in 2022 and 2023. In 2025, the EPA stated that its case against GEO Group would be dropped without providing an explanation.
In 2025, Rümeysa Öztürk, a Tufts University PhD student, was held at the South Louisiana ICE Processing Center (SLIPC), a GEO detention center in Basile, Louisiana. In court filings, she alleged that it took 20–60 minutes for a nurse to arrive when she was having asthma attacks. She also noted there were not enough language interpreters. In general, she stated, the prison conditions are "depriving us of basic human needs". In September 2025, human rights organizations including the American Civil Liberties Union of Louisiana filed complaints on behalf of four trans individuals detained at SLIPC under the Federal Tort Claims Act and submitted a civil rights complaint to U.S. Department of Homeland Security oversight bodies alleging sexual harassment, medical neglect, coerced labor, retaliation and other abuses from GEO staff dating from 2023. GEO denied the allegations.
Operation Mississippi Hustle
A federal investigation dubbed Operation Mississippi Hustle, initiated in 2014 or earlier by the United States Attorney and prosecuted in the United States District Court for the Southern District of Mississippi, examined the relationship between officials of the Mississippi Department of Corrections and local jurisdictions, and various prison contractors and subcontractors. The investigation resulted in indictments against the commissioner of the Department of Corrections, and the longtime mayor of Walnut Grove, Mississippi, both of whom resigned from office. As a result of this investigation, in February 2017, Mississippi State Attorney General Jim Hood announced a civil suit against 15 contractors and several persons for damages and punitive damages, to recover the amounts of state contracts awarded under Epps during the roughly decade-long period when he has been found to have been taking bribes. GEO Group was among the for-profit prison management companies named in this suit. Hood said that the company had been awarded $260 million in contracts in an eight-year period.
Delaney Hall hunger strike and protests
On May 22, 2026, immigrants detained in GEO Group's Delaney Hall facility in Newark, New Jersey reportedly began a hunger and labor strike protesting conditions inside the facility. The facility is used for immigrant detention under a $1 billion contract with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Caleb Vitello, then-acting Director of ICE, stated, "The location near an international airport streamlines logistics, and helps facilitate the timely processing of individuals in our custody as we pursue President Trump’s mandate to arrest, detain and remove illegal aliens from our communities". Advocates assert that detainees have been given food with worms or mold, have been harassed and allegedly sexually assaulted by guards, sleep on the floor in overcrowded rooms, and have been denied medical care for serious conditions such as cancer.
Demonstrators gathered outside Delaney Hall to support detainees and protest federal immigration policies, with some protesters blocking ICE vehicles from entering the facility. Local officials including Governor Mikie Sherrill were denied access to the facility.
In June 2026, the state of New Jersey filed a lawsuit against Geo Group alleging that the company impeded health inspectors from gaining access to the Delaney Hall facility following reports of unsafe food and sanitation, and poor medical care.
