GEO Group’s Shadow Over South Florida
- Indivisible Boca Raton
- 6 days ago
- 9 min read
Private Prisons, Political Influence, and a University Transformed
The GEO Group is one of the largest private prison and immigration detention corporations in the United States. Its facilities have been the subject of documented allegations of human rights abuses spanning decades. It has faced federal investigations, wrongful death lawsuits, and scathing reports from human rights organizations.
It is also headquartered in our city. Boca Raton, Florida.
That geographic fact is not incidental. GEO Group’s presence in South Florida has translated into political influence, institutional access, and, most recently, a direct line into the leadership of Florida Atlantic University. Understanding how that happened requires following a thread that connects the private detention industry, Tallahassee’s political machinery, and the people who have smoothed GEO’s path at every turn.
The Foundation Facade
In April 2026, the founder of Broward County nonprofit, Step Up! Inc, contacted the Indivisible Boca Raton media team with a tip. His name is Joshauwa Brown, and his organization advocates for individuals to have a fair chance at mortgage-paying careers. It is, by any measure, exactly the kind of mission the GEO Group Foundation claims to support. GEO Group’s foundation publicly lists itself on charitable databases like Candid as a provider of grants to nonprofits, schools, and public entities. Brown had every reason to take that at face value.
In 2025, he received a $10,000 grant from the foundation to support his organization’s Second Chance Month initiative. The funding came through a recommendation by Dr. Kenneth Garner, GEO Group’s Reentry Director. Brown was grateful and assumed there was a legitimate process behind it. When he followed up in 2026 to ask how to apply for future funding, he got a different answer than he expected.
A foundation representative named Christopher Ferris told him plainly: there is no open application process. Grants are not awarded competitively. Access to funding is determined entirely by internal GEO employee recommendations. There is no form to fill out. No cycle to apply to. No transparent criteria. Just insiders deciding who gets in. Brown had gone in as a grant recipient, but he came out as a whistleblower.
The GEO Group Foundation’s public-facing materials and IRS Form 990 filings describe its distributions as grants, language that implies openness and equitable access. The reality Brown encountered is a closed system dressed up in the language of charity. Who gets funded depends entirely on who you know inside GEO Group. For the hundreds of nonprofits across South Florida doing legitimate community work without a GEO insider in their corner, the foundation’s charitable veneer means nothing.
Brown has prepared a formal complaint to the IRS requesting a review of whether the foundation is operating in compliance with Florida charitable solicitation and reporting requirements, and whether its grantmaking practices are transparent and fairly accessible to nonprofit organizations statewide.
It is a small story in some ways. Ten thousand dollars is not much money in the grand scheme, but it is a precise illustration of how GEO Group operates at every level: project an image of legitimacy and community investment, while keeping actual access tightly controlled through insider relationships. The foundation is not an act of generosity. It is a tool of influence.
What GEO Group Is
GEO Group operates prisons, immigration detention centers, and community supervision programs across the United States and internationally. It is a publicly traded corporation that profits directly from the number of people held in its facilities. The more people detained, the more revenue it generates.
That business model has sparked national protests, federal investigations, wrongful death lawsuits, and decades of documented abuse. Over the years, GEO facilities have faced allegations of medical neglect, inadequate staffing, physical abuse, and deaths in custody. These are not fringe accusations. They have been documented by the American Civil Liberties Union, Amnesty International, and investigative journalists across multiple states and over multiple decades.
Amnesty International’s 2025 report, Torture and Enforced Disappearances in the Sunshine State, documented conditions at Florida immigration detention facilities that Amnesty categorized as torture: detainees held in isolation cages, denied medical care, subjected to sleep deprivation through 24-hour lighting, and coerced into signing deportation papers under threat of indefinite imprisonment. The report found that 2025 was the deadliest year in ICE detention history, with more than 30 confirmed deaths. Behind that number are human beings with names and families, whose American dream was replaced by state-sanctioned murder.
Chaofeng Ge was 32 years old. He had been inside GEO Group’s Moshannon Valley Processing Center in Pennsylvania for five days when he was found in a shower stall, hanging by his neck, with his hands and feet bound behind his back in a hog-tied position. No one at the facility spoke Mandarin. When Ge needed to communicate, when he was frightened, when he was suffering, when he was desperate, he had to write notes on scraps of paper and wait for someone outside the building to translate them and send them back.
ICE’s official report mentioned a ligature around his neck. It did not mention the bound hands and feet. His family has been fighting ever since to get photographs taken at the scene released. The federal government has refused. His attorney put it simply: “It is truly mystifying how any detention facility can let someone leave their room, create three nooses and then hang themselves without anyone knowing.”
Geraldo Lunas Campos was 55 years old, a father, when he died on January 3, 2026, at Camp East Montana at Fort Bliss in El Paso, Texas. A fellow detainee watched it happen. According to that witness, guards choked Lunas Campos to death. Another obvious case of murder with impunity. ICE said staff had “witnessed him in distress.” The Washington Post subsequently reported that the medical examiner was likely to rule the death a homicide by asphyxiation. The ACLU called it “the latest in a string of preventable deaths” reflecting “a broader pattern of unchecked violence and abuse carried out by ICE against members of our communities on the taxpayer’s dime.”
These are not isolated incidents. They are the predictable output of a system built on profit, concealment, and the systematic dehumanization of people who have no power to fight back. While not all of these facilities are operated by GEO Group specifically, the same profit incentives, the same structural lack of oversight, and the same pressure to fill beds run through the entire industry. GEO Group is at its center.
One anonymous source quoted in advocacy documentation put it plainly: “The powers that be are absolutely profiting off of having as many people as possible in detention. People are dying. People are being tortured. People are losing their humanity.”
GEO Group profits from this system. It is incorporated in Florida and headquartered in Boca Raton.
The Laken Riley Act and the Detention Boom
The conditions inside detention facilities did not emerge in a vacuum. They were the predictable consequence of a dramatic expansion of who could be detained and why.
The Laken Riley Act, signed into law on January 29, 2025, fundamentally rewrote mandatory immigration detention. Before the Act, immigration officers had prosecutorial discretion. Pregnancy, serious illness, disability, and humanitarian need were recognized grounds to avoid detention or use alternatives. That discretion served as a safety valve.
The Laken Riley Act removed it.
Under the new law, mandatory detention is triggered not by a criminal conviction, but by an arrest or accusation. An ICE officer’s subjective determination that someone may have committed an offense, including “assault of a law enforcement officer,” which in Florida requires no physical contact and no injury, is sufficient to mandate imprisonment. There is no requirement for judicial review before detention begins. There is no obligation to consider medical risk. Once the trigger is pulled, detention is automatic.
The results were immediate and catastrophic. In 2025, ICE detained more than 60,000 people. According to independent data, fewer than 3 percent had ever been convicted of a violent crime. More than 58,000 of those detained had no prior violent criminal conviction. Pregnant women were held while experiencing miscarriages. Hospitalized patients were monitored by ICE agents waiting for medical clearance so they could be taken into custody. People signed deportation papers not because they chose to leave, but because prolonged detention offered no realistic alternative.
For a corporation whose revenue scales with the detained population, the Laken Riley Act was an extraordinary windfall. GEO Group and its competitors are the infrastructure through which that expansion runs.
A University Transformed
Against this backdrop, Florida Atlantic University, located in Boca Raton, just miles from GEO Group’s corporate headquarters, hired Adam Hasner as its eighth president in March 2025.
Hasner is a lawyer and former Florida House majority leader. He served as a senior vice president at GEO Group before his appointment to FAU. He has no doctoral degree and no prior experience as an academic administrator. Faculty recognized this before he was hired. Students protested his connections to the private prison industry during the presidential forum. The community’s concerns were well-founded.
The GEO Group connection was not a minor footnote in Hasner’s background. It was central to how students and faculty understood what his leadership would mean. The company had previously tried to purchase the naming rights to FAU’s football stadium in 2013 for $6 million. Students at the time dubbed the proposal “Owlcatraz”; a name alluding to FAU’s mascot, the Owl, and the infamous Alcatraz prison with a horrific human rights record of its own. The backlash was swift enough that the deal collapsed. The university’s community knew what GEO represented. They had already said no once.
Twelve years later, GEO’s former senior vice president became FAU’s president. A GEO Group executive sits on FAU’s Board of Trustees. During Hasner’s job interview, the subject of GEO Group never came up.
287(g): ICE Comes to Campus
One of Hasner’s earliest acts as president was to sign a 287(g) agreement, a federal program that authorizes local law enforcement agencies to train alongside and collaborate with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. By signing it, Hasner made FAU’s campus police department a partner in federal immigration enforcement.
The agreement was executed with minimal transparency. Faculty and students made repeated requests for details about how it would be implemented and how officers would be deployed. Those requests were not meaningfully answered.
In September 2025, students organized a peaceful, properly permitted protest against the agreement, dubbed “ICE Off Campus.” They filed paperwork, notified FAU Police, and received approval for tabling, marching, and rally speeches. When they arrived, they were met by an overwhelming law enforcement presence from multiple agencies, including horse-mounted officers and rooftop snipers. No specific threat had been identified. The mobilization served one evident purpose: intimidation.
FAU Professor Karen J. Leader, an art history professor who spoke at the rally, later wrote: “With no discernible reason beyond intimidation, Hasner approved this staggering waste of taxpayer funds, stifling the First Amendment right of peaceable assembly.”
In the weeks that followed, the consequences for faculty who spoke critically became concrete. After the assassination of right-wing podcaster Charlie Kirk at another university, Professor Leader and two colleagues were placed on administrative leave after a social media campaign targeted them. Rather than managing the situation quietly through established university processes, Hasner announced the administrative leave publicly on FAU’s official social media account, amplifying the controversy and directing the mob’s attention at the faculty members. Death threats followed. Police cruisers with flashing lights and a surveillance tower appeared on campus. Classes moved online.
The investigation into the faculty members was outsourced to a well-connected Tallahassee law firm, at considerable public expense. The firm ultimately concluded that the professors could not be disciplined and recommended reinstatement. The two tenured professors were reinstated. The untenured colleague was not, her contract simply not renewed.
A university president with academic values and institutional backbone would have defended his faculty from the outset. Hasner did not.
The Bigger Picture
GEO Group is not simply a company that operates prisons. It is a political actor. It donates to campaigns, hires well-connected lobbyists, and places its executives in positions of public influence. The hiring of Adam Hasner at Florida Atlantic University is a case study in how that influence works in practice.
A corporation with a long record of human rights allegations now has a former senior executive running one of Florida’s largest public universities. That university’s police department has been deputized to assist with federal immigration enforcement. Faculty who criticize these arrangements face retaliation. Students who organize peaceful protests are met with a show of force.
This is not an accident. It is the result of deliberate choices made by identifiable people in identifiable positions of power. While GEO Group is headquartered in Boca Raton, its influence does not stay inside its corporate campus. It has spread into the classroom, onto the quad, and into the offices of South Florida’s elected representatives.
The question is not whether this is happening. The documentation is clear. The question is what South Florida residents, voters, students, and faculty intend to do about it.
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