GEO Group partnering with South Florida city on proposed immigration detention center

The GEO Group, a Boca Raton-based prison firm, is partnering with at least one Florida municipality on a proposed immigration detention center in South Florida.

The GEO Group and Florida City are working on an application to Immigration and Customs Enforcement to bring the detention center to southern Miami-Dade County. Under the proposal, the company would design, build and manage the facility, and the city would provide 40 acres of land.

In a letter to a member of the Miami-Dade County Commission, Florida City Mayor Otis Wallace explains that he and the CEO of the the GEO Group met at federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement headquarters in Washington to discuss the project, which according to the letter would cost about $150 million to build and include beds for up to 2,300 detainees. Wallace did not respond to e-mails and phone messages seeking comment on the proposal.

The company and the city would be responsible for building the proposed facility under guidelines set by ICE. Two other South Florida municipalities, one in Palm Beach County and one in Broward, are also competing for the facility, according to Wallace’s letter.

Wallace notes in his letter that GEO is a leader in the private prison industry, and that the facility would bring hundreds of jobs to his city. He was seeking support for an extension of public transportation service to the proposed site, which the commission approved in a resolution.

A letter from Amber Martin, GEO’s vice president of contract administration, thanks Wallace for his support in this project and for meeting with ICE in Washington D.C.

An e-mail from an ICE spokesman explains that the proposed multi-purpose facility would house medium-security detainees as well as immigrant detainees who have not committed crimes but are involved in deportation proceedings. It also says ICE is evaluating three proposals from different governments, in some cases with a private company as a partner.

The ICE spokesman declined to comment on which other local governments were competing for the detention center. Asked about the GEO Group’s role in this project, he said that is not public information at this time.

The e-mail from ICE also explains that:

• The selected government entity and its partner would be responsible for covering the cost of building the facility, if construction is necessary.
• If construction is necessary the cost of the proposed facility might be in the range of 100 – 200 million dollars.
• The facility should be able to house approximately 1800 detainees.
• The facility will help ICE reduce “the transfers of detainees from one geographic area to another due to the lack of detention resources.”

ICE’s description of the project, and other related documents, can be found here.

The GEO Group, based in Boca Raton, already operates the Broward Transitional Center, which houses mostly non-criminal detainees, under a contract with ICE. As for the proposed South Florida facility, GEO spokesman Pablo Paez said in an e-mail that “as a matter of policy, our company cannot comment on any specific business development efforts.”

ICE’s use of private detention facilities has been a subject of controversy. The Detention Watch Network released a report last week that indicates that ICE maintains a daily population of over 32,000 immigrant detainees. According to the report, in the last five years the number of immigrants detained and the costs of detaining them has doubled, costing taxpayers $1.7 billion at an average of $122 a day per bed, and nearly 2.5 million individuals have passed through immigration detention facilities since 2003.

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