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(Video) For-Profit Detention Is the Business Model at Broward Transitional Center

Writer: Indivisible Boca Raton
Indivisible Boca Raton
Aug 23
3 min read

Updated: Sep 3

Inside PBCIIC's Freedom Vigils, and the System They're Standing Against



On a sunny Sunday afternoon, the Palm Beach County Indivisible Immigration Coalition hosted a peaceful prayer vigil. Not a protest march, not a rally, but a vigil, meant to let the people detained inside know they haven’t been forgotten.


The facility behind them was Broward Transitional Center and this was one of their recurring Freedom Vigils.



Why They Continue To Show Up

Participants describe what they’ve learned about the people held inside: men and women with no criminal records and no warrants, who don’t know whether they’ll be deported to their home country, sent somewhere unfamiliar, or held indefinitely. They describe detainees being denied visits with family, denied legal counsel, denied medication, denied clean water, and kept in overcrowded rooms without enough food, conditions that, if accurate, would violate basic standards of humane treatment regardless of anyone’s immigration status.


Signing a deportation order doesn’t mean release. Vigil participants describe people who sign the paperwork agreeing to leave the country, then remain in custody anyway, sometimes for weeks or months longer.


Who Runs Broward Transitional Center

Broward Transitional Center is owned and operated by the GEO Group, a publicly traded, for-profit prison and detention company, under a contract with Immigration and Customs Enforcement reported at more than $20 million a year. [Wikipedia] [ICE.gov] It’s officially designated to hold “non-criminal and low security” detainees, including asylum seekers with no prior criminal history.


The facility has a documented history of complaints, mostly centered on medical care: a detainee returned to her cell the same day as ovarian surgery while still bleeding, a man denied medical attention for days while experiencing blood in his urine, a federal lawsuit from two detainees alleging denial of prescribed medication. In 2010, one former detainee said he was barred from using his asthma inhaler. Members of Congress asked ICE to investigate; the letter reportedly went unanswered. [Wikipedia]


None of that is incidental to the business model. A facility paid per detainee, per day, has a financial incentive to keep beds full and turnover slow, not to process people quickly and release them. These are for-profit prisons, and the point isn’t just deporting people, it’s detaining and maintaining them so the facility can keep profiting off them.

Broward Transitional Center isn’t an outlier in drawing this kind of attention either. Other South Florida groups have held their own recurring vigils outside the same facility, a sign of how many people this system touches. [CBS News Miami]


The Law That Makes This Bigger Every Year

Vigil participants also point to the 287(g) agreement which turns county sheriffs and local police into “de facto ICE agents.” It allows ICE to deputize local law enforcement to carry out immigration enforcement duties. As of February 2025, all 67 Florida county sheriffs had signed on to the broadest version of it, the Task Force Model, which lets officers enforce immigration law during ordinary police work, not just inside county jails. Florida is reportedly the only state where every single county has adopted that model. [Police1] [ACLU]


How You Can Help

PBCIIC holds Freedom Vigils outside Broward Transitional Center to make sure the people inside, and their families, know they haven’t been forgotten, and to keep public attention on a detention system built to profit from delay.



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