The company that owns Michigan’s North Lake Processing Center, the largest immigration detention facility in the Midwest, reported $254 million in profit last year, up nearly 700 percent from $32 million in 2024.
The GEO Group is one of the largest private prison operators in the country. Across all of their facilities, including immigration detention centers, the company operates 97 facilities, totaling about 74,000 beds.
In a Feb. 12 call with investors, executive chairman and founder George Zoley said the company saw more new business in 2025 than ever before.
“Over the past year, we've captured new growth opportunities that could generate up to $520 million in annualized revenues, making it the most successful period for new business wins in our company's history,” Zoley said.
Last year, GEO Group signed contracts to continue providing air and ground transportation and electronic monitoring and supervision services to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The company, which donated $1 million to President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign, also signed four new contracts to house ICE detainees in New Jersey, Georgia, Florida and Michigan, raising the company’s ICE capacity from about 20,000 beds to about 26,000.
The Michigan facility, the North Lake Processing Center, is located in Baldwin, Michigan. The facility reopened last June as an immigration processing facility after closing in 2022 after former President Joe Biden banned privately owned prisons in the federal system.
ICE is currently working to expand its detention capacity to 100,000 beds, an effort the Trump administration allocated $45 billion to last year. They are also looking to expand to more large-scale facilities to hold detainees, purchasing warehouses in Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Arizona. Zoley said he believes these efforts will help GEO Group’s finances in the coming year.
“We believe the federal government is continuing its focus to increase immigration detention capacity and looking for solutions as to how to upscale to 100,000 beds or more and consolidate to fewer larger facilities. As a 40-year partner to ICE, we expect to be part of this solution,” Zoley said.
“We continue to be in active discussions with ICE regarding our remaining available capacity and are currently in discussions for the potential activation of additional facilities," he said.
The company also announced leadership changes on Feb. 12. Current CEO J. David Donahue will be retiring at the end of February, and Zoley will be taking over the position from March 2026 to April 2029. The announcement of the leadership changes and slight underperformance in earnings per share led the company’s stock price to drop 14% on Feb. 12.