Trump crackdown on immigrants aided by largest US private prison operator: Report
Surveillance technology is becoming increasingly prevalent in the detention and deportation of both legal and illegal immigrants in the US.
One group that has benefitted from the surveillance of illegal immigrants is the Geo Group, the largest private prison group in the US, whose stock prices rose when President Donald Trump was elected. The company makes digital tools to track immigrants, such as facial recognition apps, GPS trackers, ankle monitors, and smart watches.
Since Trump’s election, the company has become a net beneficiary of the Trump administration, according to a report by The New York Times. Its surveillance products aid in the current administration’s immigration policies, which have seen an additional 30,000 immigrants taken into detention since Trump assumed his second term.
The immigration system is comprised of a two-tier system where people are either put in detention or kept outside and surveilled. Prior to Trump’s second term, 30,000 people were locked up in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention facilities around the country.
Millions more, however, who are not in detention, have ongoing cases in immigration courts and are in what ICE refers to as the “non-detained docket (NDD)”. These people include the gamut of asylum seekers, people with revoked visas, and undocumented workers.
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Around 182,000 people are currently subjected to immigration surveillance under a programme called the "Intensive Supervision Appearance Program (ISAP)".
Surveillance products used on people under ISAP provide their location to ICE, according to legal aid groups and immigration organisations, which say that that the products have been used to make hundreds of arrests.
The Geo Group has been given new federal contracts to house unauthorised immigrants, and the Department of Homeland Security is apparently reviewing the renewal of last year’s contract with the company, which was worth around $350m and involved tracking around 200,000 immigrants.
According to a report in The Lever, the apps could track up to five million people caught up in the immigration system.
Costly
While the Geo Group’s products have been criticised for being inaccurate, they are also expensive. For tracking purposes, immigrants who are not in detention are required to send selfies to immigration officials regularly. When immigrants take photos of themselves on the Geo Group company’s SmartLink app, the federal government pays roughly $1, which can cost millions of dollars each year.
Moreover, the cost of an immigrant wearing Geo’s VeriWatch smartwatch costs $3 a day. If the watch is lost, Geo Group bills the government $380. Meanwhile, an Apple Watch SE retails for $250.
An open bidding system might allow for competitors to offer less expensive products, but according to The New York Times report, “attempts to modify the program and open the contract to rival bids have been stymied by Geo Group’s lobbying and connections on Capitol Hill and within ICE”.
Former senior ICE employees have allegedly gone on to work at the company.
For example, some Biden administration officials in the DHS questioned the cost and effectiveness of the Geo Group’s tracking programme in 2022.
The DHS officials met to draft a plan because they wanted to break up the contract into three parts to solicit new bids, according to The New York Times. Around the same time, DHS tech workers were asked to develop cheaper alternatives to Geo Group.
But the Geo Group apparently began lobbying to disrupt the plans. Daniel Bible, ICE’s head of enforcement and removal operations at the time, also stalled the changes by ordering lengthy reviews and delaying approvals, apparently before joining Geo Group as an executive.
Therefore, plans to develop less costlier alternatives to Geo Group technology have never made it past testing.
The Geo Group is headquartered in Florida and was set up in 1984 as a division of a security guard business. It expanded into running private prisons and now has about 100 facilities, including the facilities in Louisiana where Mahmoud Khalil, Rumeysa Ozturk, and Alireza Doroudi are being held.
The Geo Group paid $415m in 2011 for Behavioral Interventions, a Colorado company founded in the 1970s to track cattle and which expanded to monitoring parolees. The company had an exclusive contract with ICE to digitally monitor thousands of recently arrived immigrants.
Remote surveillance of immigrants is cheaper than keeping them in detention centres, which are already overburdened in the US.
By 2022, more than 300,000 immigrants were enrolled in the programme.
Surveillance programme
Unauthorised immigrants who come under Geo’s surveillance receive an ankle bracelet, a smartwatch or a smartphone with the company’s monitoring app. They are overseen by Geo Group case specialists rather than ICE agents.
While such immigrants live more freely in the United States than those in detention, they are constantly monitored and are restricted in their movements.
One Geo Group case worker that The New York Times spoke with, who declined to be identified for fear of retaliation, described using a Google Maps-like software to track immigrants’ locations.
Immigrants who were not at home or lied about their whereabouts during a check-in, received a "strike". Immigrants who received three strikes would have their monitoring increase and would be reported to an ICE agent. ICE could then detain the person or expedite the person’s deportation.
Those under surveillance are limited to where they can travel, lawyers and immigration rights groups said. If immigrants leave the set radius of where they are allowed to be, the software alerts case officers.
Since many check-ins must happen from home on a prescribed day - say on a Friday from 9 am to 5 pm - people are often stuck waiting, affecting their ability to work or perform certain day-to-day tasks.
Geo Group employees had trouble monitoring up to 300 immigrants simultaneously. A case worker recalled being asked to make 12 home visits - at a cost of $88 per visit - to immigrants in a single day. Each visit is limited to five minutes, despite requirements to do a full report on the immigrant’s living conditions.
Under Trump’s second term, many of those under the surveillance programme are being rounded up and put into detention facilities. Critics have warned that the technology may be used for larger roundups of immigrants.
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