On Saturday, March 8, Mahmoud Khalil was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers in his Columbia University campus apartment as his pregnant wife videotaped on her phone. Currently, Khalil is being held at the Central Louisiana ICE Processing Center, La Salle Detention Facility in Jena, Louisiana.

On Monday, March 17, Badar Khan Suri was confronted by individuals who identified themselves as representatives of the Department of Homeland Security. They told him his academic visa, which he had been granted to continue his doctoral studies on peacebuilding in Iraq and Afghanistan, had been revoked. He was taken into custody and is now being held at a “staging facility” in Alexandria, Lousiana.

On Tuesday, March 25, Rumeysa Ozturk was confronted by plainclothed, masked federal agents on the sidewalk in Somerville, Massachusetts, handcuffed, put into an unmarked vehicle and driven across state lines, despite a court order not to leave Massachusetts without a 48-hour notice. She is currently being held at South Louisiana ICE Processing Center.

While these three jails are called “ICE detention centers” by most news outlets, there’s more to the story than that. The three facilities holding Mahmoud, Suri and Ozturk are not owned or operated by the U.S. government. They are owned and operated by GEO Group, one of the biggest private prison companies in America.

Instead of running its detention centers, the Department of Homeland Security contracts with the GEO Group to operate them. On its website, the GEO group describes itself as “committed to providing leading, evidence-based rehabilitation programs to individuals while in-custody and post-release into the community through the GEO Continuum of Care.” However, because this is a private corporation, the GEO Group’s profit incentive does not align with this mission.

Eight percent of Americans serving criminal sentences after a criminal trial are held in private prisons. The Department of Justice contracts with private prison companies, the three biggest being CoreCivic, GEO Group and Management and Training Corporation, which get paid per inmate. It is not in the best interest of these prisons to rehabilitate individuals, as their bottom line rests upon having no empty beds. This plays out in the real-life outcomes for incarcerated individuals. Those held in private prisons have higher recidivism rates than those who serve their sentences in public prisons. Higher recidivism rates equal higher profits. In a textbook case of incentive misalignment, the private prison thrives on keeping people locked up.

How, then, did the GEO group get in on the enforcement (or the active violation of) immigration law? Under the Biden administration, the DOJ was ordered to phase out contracts with private prisons (an executive order since reversed by Trump). This marked a pivot in strategy for the GEO Group, which increased its focus on detaining and surveilling immigrants, as these activities fell under the purview of the Department of Homeland Security, not the DOJ.

In the 2024 presidential election cycle, the Make America Great PAC benefited from a million dollars in donations from Geo Acquisition II Inc. — a subsidiary of the private prison company. On a company call in 2024, GEO Group President Wayne Calabrese made it clear he was ready to do business with the Trump administration: “What is new is a potential sea change by the incoming Trump administration that is expected to implement a much more aggressive policy towards interior and border immigration enforcement. We believe that the private sector will play a critical role in assisting the government in carrying out its objectives.”

Mahmoud Khalil, Rumeysa Ozturk and Badar Khan Suri all had legal standing to be in the U.S., either on academic visas or green cards. Rumeysa was moved to the GEO Group prison against a court order barring her from being moved across state lines. Those whose resident status is being contested by the U.S. government are typically served an order to appear before an immigration judge, not detained abruptly. These people almost always have committed a crime or have attempted to defraud the immigration system.

On April 11, an immigration judge in Louisiana ruled that Khalil could be deported due to his activism for the Palestinian people, which it equated to antisemitism. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that because combating antisemitism worldwide is a goal of U.S. foreign policy, Khalid could be deported for hindering these aims. However, it is likely to be months before he is truly deported, as his lawyers plan to challenge this ruling. For Khalil, these months will be spent between four walls of a cell in Louisiana. Each day that Khalid remains within these four walls, the GEO Group will get paid for his shelter and care.

On April 9, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services announced that it will begin screening the social media accounts of “aliens applying for lawful permanent resident status, foreign students and aliens affiliated with educational institutions linked to antisemitic activity.” On the aforementioned call, GEO Group CEO Wayne Calabrese noted his desire to derive profit from increased surveillance carried out under the Trump administration: “We have assured ICE of our capability to rapidly scale up our capabilities to monitor and oversee several hundreds of thousands, or even several millions of individuals in order to achieve the federal government’s immigration law compliance objectives.”

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services has yet to say how it plans to carry out this surveillance. GEO Group is waiting and ready.