Corpofascism | Private Prisons & Detention Contractors

A Note on This Page

Every entry below is preliminary. These are dated, sourced notes on unfolding events judged relevant to a future Volume 2 paper — not the papers themselves, and not yet integrated into the numbered chapter dossiers on The Evidence or The Actors. Every Corpofascism paper published from this point forward is labeled Volume 2. When an addendum below is developed into a full paper, it will be removed from this page and linked from its permanent home instead.

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Private Prisons & Detention Contractors

The three companies holding most of the people ICE detains — GEO Group, CoreCivic, and LaSalle — and the corporate structures they deploy when asked to answer for what happens inside.

Relevant to Ch. 31, The Contractor’s Hand — and to Ch. 1, The Company Town

The corporate form as a shield against accountability

Of everything logged on this page, this is the item that most directly restates the book’s founding argument. In October 2025 a federal jury in the Western District of Louisiana returned $42.75 million against LaSalle Management Company over a death in its custody — per plaintiffs’ counsel, the largest verdict against a private correctional company in United States history and the largest civil rights verdict ever in Louisiana. What LaSalle argued on appeal is the part that belongs in this book.

Erie Moore Sr. was a 57-year-old retired mill worker with no criminal history, father of three. Monroe police arrested him on October 12, 2015 for disturbing the peace — a misdemeanor. He was booked into LaSalle’s Richwood Correctional Center at roughly 7:45 a.m. and placed in an isolation cell. In his lawyer’s summary: “Within 36 hours of arriving at the LaSalle facility, Mr. Moore was being carried out, blood was filling his skull. He had suffered a traumatic brain injury in the jail, and he would never wake up again.” He died November 14, 2015. The Ouachita Parish coroner ruled it a homicide caused by head injuries. The jury found that the “four-way” restraint violated his rights and — the finding that matters structurally — that using the four-way and chemical spray to punish detainees was a “custom or practice.” Damages: $1.5 million for pain and suffering, $6 million to each of three children, $23.25 million punitive. His family filed in 2016 and waited a decade.

The defense is the thesis. The jury found Richwood Correctional Center and LaSalle Management Company “were a single integrated enterprise.” LaSalle appealed precisely that finding, calling the supporting evidence “superficial” and “insufficient.” In a separate wrongful-death case, LaSalle’s attorney argued that conduct at other LaSalle prisons is irrelevant to whether its medical policies are adequate, on this reasoning: “Each correctional facility is owned and operated by a separate LLC.” That is the company-town structure of Chapter 1 rebuilt as a liability firewall — a single operating enterprise for the purpose of winning contracts and running facilities, and a scatter of unrelated legal persons for the purpose of answering for what happens inside them.

From the same litigation, a LaSalle jail nurse’s recorded response after a detainee’s sixth seizure in a day and a half: “We don’t send people to the hospital for seizures.” He was dead two hours later.

The pipeline from jail to detention center. Richwood Correctional Center — the facility where Moore died — now operates as a federal immigration detention site. ICE has stated that LaSalle is “an important part of ICE’s detention system.” The company runs jails and detention centers across Louisiana and Texas and is among the largest jailers of ICE detainees in the country. In April 2026, Alejandro Cabrera Clemente, 49, was found dead at LaSalle’s Winn Correctional Center in rural Louisiana; Prison Legal News noted Winn sits in a cluster of private facilities it describes as notorious for medical neglect and chronic understaffing.

The custody death toll gives the scale. By April 12, 2026 — when 27-year-old Cuban national Aled Damien Carbonell-Betancourt was found dead in a Miami detention center, suicide given as probable cause — he was the 17th person to die in ICE custody in 2026 alone, roughly one per week, and the 48th since January 2025. By April, the year had already reached half of 2025’s record count.

All three contractors, and where each currently stands. GEO Group operates Adelanto, where a federal judge in July 2026 had to order the provision of clean water, soap, and medical care under a roughly $400 million annual ICE contract — documented in the Immigration section above. In July 2026 the Supreme Court declined GEO’s bid for immunity in a suit brought by Colorado ICE detainees. CoreCivic settled a suit over a suicide in a New Mexico ICE facility in 2026 after being sanctioned for spoliation of evidence, and separately faced a $27.75 million verdict over a Montana prisoner nearly beaten to death. LaSalle is above. Responses recorded: LaSalle did not respond to requests for comment on the Moore verdict and denies that the named entities bear responsibility in the pending case; its appeal of the “single integrated enterprise” finding is live and unresolved. Sources: WFAA’s Jailed to Death series and verdict coverage; KNOE (Oct. 23, 2025); ABC News wire (Oct. 24, 2025); Qureshi Law statement; The Advocate (Jun. 23, 2026) on the pending Anderson case and the separate-LLC argument; Prison Legal News (May 2026) on the custody death count, plus its July 2026 items on the GEO and CoreCivic rulings.

Relevant to Ch. 31, The Contractor’s Hand — extends the entry above

Congress said decrease

The Separate LLC used this dossier’s strongest single case — Erie Moore’s death at LaSalle’s Richwood facility — to make an argument about corporate form. This entry documents a different mechanism, at a different LaSalle facility, that the earlier paper does not cover: what happens when the agency's response to an explicit congressional order is to do the opposite of it, using a private contractor as the instrument.

In February 2019, Congress mandated that ICE decrease its detention population. Two months later, ICE filed a proposal for additional bed space at LaSalle's Winn Correctional Center — to double its capacity from 1,576 to 3,152 beds. The facility's own white paper described the expansion as support for “the current mass illegal immigrant population” while explicitly planning to “continue supporting ICE after the mass totals subside” — a temporary surge measure written, in its own founding document, as a permanent one.

The contract was signed not between ICE and LaSalle directly, but between ICE and the Winn Parish Sheriff, with LaSalle as the operator beneath that layer — a further degree of separation between the federal mandate being defied and the entity actually running the facility. Cost: nearly $13 million for the first year, more than $7 million of it for bed-days and more than $5 million to install an air conditioning system the facility had never had. That December, ICE officers at Winn pepper-sprayed roughly fifty detainees engaged in a peaceful protest. Winn is the same LaSalle facility where Alejandro Cabrera Clemente was found dead in April 2026, already documented elsewhere on this page — one location, a six-year throughline.

A structural feature worth naming generally: ICE detention contracts frequently include “guaranteed minimum” provisions, under which the contractor is paid a set amount regardless of how many beds are actually filled — removing any financial link between the money spent and the enforcement need it is nominally funding. Source: Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), based on documents obtained via FOIA (Oct. 2020); ACLU, “Unchecked Growth: Private Prison Corporations and Immigration Detention” (2023), on guaranteed-minimum contract structures and CoreCivic's $552.2 million in 2022 ICE revenue, cited here for the mechanism's persistence rather than as a 2026 event.

Relevant to Ch. 31, The Contractor’s Hand — a third company, the same pattern

The monitor confirms what the first visit already found

GEO Group runs Adelanto. LaSalle runs Richwood and Winn. This entry documents CoreCivic, at a third facility, and the pattern is not company-specific — it is what happens when the full formal apparatus of oversight engages exactly as designed and still does not change what happens inside.

CoreCivic reopened California City — a former state and federal prison in the Mojave Desert — as an ICE facility in September 2025. Within weeks, Disability Rights California conducted a monitoring visit and documented failure to provide medical and mental health care, failure to process disability accommodations, failure to meet basic needs including food, water, and clothing, staff harassment of detainees, and unnecessary use of solitary confinement.

What followed is a complete, textbook sequence of institutional response. December 19, 2025: California Attorney General Rob Bonta formally warned DHS the facility had opened without being adequately prepared. January 16, 2026: twenty-six members of Congress, led by Reps. Nanette Barragán and Judy Chu, wrote to DHS and ICE urging investigation of CoreCivic specifically. January 22, 2026: Rep. Ro Khanna's own oversight visit produced a first-person account — 1,428 people detained, 215 of them women, held solely for civil immigration matters; temperatures cold enough that staff struggled to take notes, with no policy for cold-weather clothing and not a single detainee wearing a jacket; infrequent showers, no laundry schedule, hygiene failures “obvious… not least by smell.” Seven detainees sued over due-process violations tied to inadequate healthcare. In February 2026, U.S. District Judge Maxine Chesney ordered the government to demonstrate constitutionally adequate care across eight specific categories and appointed an independent monitor, Dr. Muthusamy Anandkumar.

Anandkumar's report, released in July 2026 — ten months after the facility opened — found inadequate emergency care, dental care, and chronic disease management, and failure to provide timely access to prescribed medications. The report's findings, in the reporting's own words, “mirror many of the conclusions found” in Disability Rights California's original visit from the facility's first month of operation. A disability-rights monitor, a state attorney general, twenty-six members of Congress, a sitting House member's personal inspection, a federal judge, and a court-appointed independent physician all reached the same finding, in sequence, over ten months. The facility's practice did not move.

California's legislature has since introduced SB 995, the Masuma Khan Justice Act — named for a woman sent to the facility after a routine immigration check-in in October 2025, who alleged poor conditions and denied medical treatment before her release — which would require any detention facility operating in California to meet California's own safety and human-rights standards regardless of who runs it or who it answers to.

Sources: Disability Rights California, monitoring report (Sept. 2025); California DOJ press release (Dec. 19, 2025); Rep. Barragán and Rep. Chu, congressional letter (Jan. 16, 2026); Rep. Khanna, oversight letter (Jan. 22, 2026); CalMatters (Jul. 2026), on Dr. Anandkumar's report, carried by UPI, the Davis Vanguard, and the Pleasanton Weekly; the Los Angeles Times, on SB 995 and the Masuma Khan Justice Act.

Relevant to Ch. 1, The Company Town — and directly to the California City entry above under The Monitor Confirms

The government bought the building the violations happened in

California City — the facility documented above under The Monitor Confirms, where a court-appointed physician's July 2026 findings mirrored what a disability-rights monitor had found in the facility's first month — now belongs to the federal government outright. CoreCivic sold it.

On July 2, 2026, CoreCivic completed the sale of two California facilities to the Department of Homeland Security for a combined $1.5 billion: $732.6 million for California City and $739.2 million for the Otay Mesa Detention Center in San Diego. CoreCivic will continue operating both under its existing ICE contracts — California City through 2027, Otay Mesa through 2029 with an option to 2034 — meaning the sale changes who owns the walls without changing who runs what happens inside them. CoreCivic bought the San Diego land for $10.3 million originally.

The transaction sits inside a larger pattern of accelerating revenue. CoreCivic reported $2.2 billion in total 2025 revenue, up 13% from the year before, before this one-time sale is even counted. GEO Group reported $2.6 billion, up 6%, and separately won two new five-year contract extensions — for Adelanto and a Bakersfield facility — worth more than $3.7 billion combined. An earlier round of contracts, announced in October 2025 and funded by the $45 billion Congress added to ICE's budget, included reopening Oklahoma's long-idle Diamondback Correctional Facility, structured with a fixed monthly payment plus what the company's own release calls an “incremental per diem payment based on detainee populations” — the same per-body financial structure already documented in the Congress Said Decrease entry above.

Recorded for accuracy. CoreCivic frames the sale as a routine capital transaction — a spokesperson called asset transfers of this kind “not uncommon for the government” — and continuity of operations and staffing was explicitly preserved, which is a genuine business rationale independent of any accountability question. The point this entry records is narrower and does not depend on the company's intent: California City's operator, staff, and daily practice are unchanged by the sale, even as the facility's underlying ownership has. Sources: Times of San Diego, via the NOTUS/Newswell partnership (Oct. 6, 2025); iNewsource and CalMatters (Jul. 2026), on the sale; TIME (2026), on both companies' 2025 revenue figures.

Relevant to Ch. 31, The Contractor’s Hand — a fourth company, and a law the state declined to use on itself

Six wardens, one law never applied

Trousdale Turner Correctional Center, Tennessee's largest prison, has had six wardens since it opened under CoreCivic in 2016. In August 2024, the Justice Department opened a civil rights investigation under CRIPA, citing what it called violence “endemic” since the facility's first year.

Between July 2022 and June 2023, the facility recorded at least 196 assaults, 90 incidents of sexual misconduct, two murders, and 15 deaths classified as accidental — the highest homicide rate of any prison in the country. Five people were stabbed in a single three-week span in early 2024. The comparison DOJ's own investigators found most damning: the death rate at Tennessee's state-run facilities was 647 per 100,000 prisoners in fiscal year 2022–23; at CoreCivic-run facilities, it was 949 — 47% higher.

Tennessee's legislature responded with an actual mechanism, not just a report: SB 1115, signed by Governor Bill Lee in May 2025, mandates an automatic 10% reduction in the prisoner population at any private facility whose mortality rate exceeds the state-run rate — precisely the condition Trousdale Turner had just been shown to meet. The state renewed CoreCivic's contract anyway, with a $6.8 million increase in 2024 and a further $13 million in 2025, bringing CoreCivic's share of the DOC's requested 2026 budget above 15%. The facility's current warden was placed on administrative leave in 2025 amid lawsuits alleging he covered up assault reports; CoreCivic says the leave is unrelated to the federal investigation.

Recorded for accuracy. Legal responsibility for conditions at Trousdale Turner rests with the state of Tennessee, not CoreCivic alone — the facility is owned by a Trousdale County agency, and DOJ's own announcement stressed that Tennessee, not the contractor, is constitutionally accountable for what happens there. Whether SB 1115's reduction mandate has since been triggered or enforced was not confirmed in the sources reviewed and should be checked before further use. Source: Prison Legal News (Mar. 2025 and Jun. 2026); The Week; WPLN; NewsChannel5; Nashville Banner; Nashville Scene, on the warden's administrative leave and pending lawsuits.

Extends the Winn Correctional Center entry above — a second death, two months later, and an official inspection

Two deaths, two months, one inspection report

The Congress Said Decrease entry above documents Winn's 2019 expansion in defiance of a congressional order, and the April 2026 death of Alejandro Cabrera Clemente. A second death followed within two months, alongside an official federal inspection finding the conditions that likely made it possible.

Mamuka Artmeladze, 43, from the country of Georgia, was found unresponsive at Winn on June 4, 2026 — the facility's second death in less than two months, and the nineteenth ICE-custody death nationwide since January 1. He had no criminal record, like most of Winn's roughly 1,500 detainees; Border Patrol had allowed him to remain in the country under supervision since 2022, and he was detained in February 2026 after ICE determined his status had lapsed. The coroner's report on Cabrera Clemente's earlier death, obtained separately by the AP, ruled natural causes from cardiovascular disease — but recorded that he had woken up coughing and wheezing roughly two and a half hours before he was found unresponsive, told staff he was fine, and went back to sleep.

Days before Artmeladze's death, the Department of Homeland Security's own Inspector General released a report on an unannounced inspection at Winn finding violations across environmental health and safety, food service, use of force, and medical care: water leaking through kitchen vents, holes and exposed insulation in the intake building's ceiling, and food stored in freezers above required temperatures.

Recorded for accuracy. ICE disputes characterizations of systemic medical neglect at its facilities generally; the OIG report's findings are the government's own, not an advocacy group's characterization, which is why this entry treats them as established rather than alleged. Cabrera Clemente's cause of death was formally ruled natural, and this entry does not assert otherwise — it records the timeline the coroner's own report documents. Source: Associated Press (Jun. 8, 2026), carried by NBC News, the Washington Times, and multiple other outlets on the same wire report.

Relevant to Ch. 31, The Contractor’s Hand — a fifth facility, and a contract renegotiated to require less

The saved sample, the unsubstantiated finding

University of Washington researchers reviewed a decade of records at GEO Group's Northwest ICE Processing Center in Tacoma: 172 separate reports of alleged sexual abuse or assault between 2015 and 2025. More than half were closed as “unsubstantiated” by GEO's own internal review — including a case where the evidence existed and was, on the available account, never used.

In June 2024, a detainee reported being forced into oral sex on multiple occasions and saved a semen sample for DNA testing. Two months later, before the sample had been analyzed, GEO closed the case as unsubstantiated. An attorney representing detainees in a separate lawsuit described the structural problem plainly: the facility's population is transient by design, so “people come through there, and they can be abused, and by the time anything can be done about it, they're often gone.” That lawsuit, filed by three Black men, alleges guards sexually groped a detainee during a pat-down out of camera view, slammed another to the concrete floor and placed him in solitary stripped of clothing for objecting to a cell search, and beat a third so severely for requesting his own legal documents that he had to be carried out on a stretcher.

Washington's governor and attorney general filed legal action against GEO in April 2026 after the facility's administrator twice denied state inspectors entry, citing ICE's own direction to refuse them — documented in court filings. A federal judge became involved in the effort to secure an inspection warrant; the state's Department of Health separately sued for access to inspect water, air, and food standards and, as of the most recent reporting, has not won it. The same UW review found that ICE's newest contract extension with GEO lowers the standards for conditions inside the facility and decreases GEO's accountability for what happens there, compared to the contract it replaced.

Recorded for accuracy. One labor inspection that did go forward found no violations, though the same reporting notes real limits on what state officials are permitted to examine at a facility GEO and ICE treat as exempt from state oversight; this entry does not claim every complaint at the facility is substantiated, only that the review and closure process itself is what researchers and litigants are challenging. GEO Group did not respond to requests for comment cited in this reporting. Source: Cascade PBS (multiple 2025–2026 pieces, read in full); OPB (May 2026), on the UW Center for Human Rights report; KING5 and The Urbanist, on the Pierce County lawsuit; The Urbanist (May 2026), on the state's legal action and the contract-extension findings.

Relevant to Ch. 1, The Company Town — a contract an expert called too thin to hold anyone accountable

“Worst of the worst,” a defunct wing, and a contract with no rent clause

In September 2025, Louisiana reopened Camp J — a section of Angola prison closed since 2018 after deteriorating into what its own state description called “a significant threat of injury” to anyone inside — as an ICE detention facility. Officials branded it “Louisiana Lockup,” explicitly grouped by DHS Secretary Kristi Noem alongside “CECOT, Cornhusker Clink, [and] Speedway Slammer” as intimidation-branded facilities nationwide.

The state contracted with LaSalle Corrections on August 29, 2025, for up to two years. Louisiana bills the federal government $949,000 a month to house detainees there — reimbursed, according to public records Axios obtained. Loyola law professor Andrea Armstrong, an expert in corrections oversight, reviewed the contract at Axios's request and called it thin: it specifies no staffing requirements beyond a general reference to federal guidelines, and contains no provision requiring LaSalle to pay rent back to the state for using a facility Louisiana taxpayers built — which Armstrong called unusual.

Officials described the population as “the worst of the worst” criminal offenders being consolidated for deportation. The facility opened holding 51 people, expanding toward a capacity of more than 400 — official tours noted “kennel-looking cages” whose purpose no official present would explain. Angola itself, the country's largest maximum-security prison, sits on a former slave plantation still worked as a farm by its incarcerated population.

Recorded for accuracy. A thin contract is not, on its own, evidence of intent to avoid accountability; state officials frame the arrangement as fast, necessary capacity-building rather than a deliberate weakening of oversight, and Armstrong's critique is an expert's professional judgment rather than a finding of wrongdoing. Whether the federal reimbursement covers the full monthly cost was not confirmed by state officials in the source reviewed. Source: Axios New Orleans (Jan. 8, 2026), read in full; Louisiana Illuminator; NewsNation and WAFB, on the facility's opening and stated capacity.

Relevant to Ch. 31, The Contractor’s Hand — a reporting law, and the specific loophole found in it

Released just before death, which is not the same as dying in custody

Texas law requires jails to report in-custody deaths to the state's own oversight body. LaSalle's record at the Bi-State Jail in Texarkana shows what happens when a company treats that requirement as something to be timed around rather than complied with.

Investigations by the Texas Commission on Jail Standards found LaSalle employees at Bi-State falsified jail records, claimed to have completed required training they had not taken, and beat prisoners or withheld their medications. The Commission separately documented a specific practice: releasing dying prisoners and detainees to hospitals or their families in the hours before death, which both relieved LaSalle of paying for their terminal care and meant the death was never classified as an in-custody death requiring investigation — because, on paper, it did not happen in custody.

One woman held there, Barlow-Austin, was finally taken to the hospital on June 11, 2019, near death: pupils fixed and dilated, severely dehydrated, emaciated. LaSalle did not notify her family she had been hospitalized; when they learned on their own, LaSalle refused them visitation until the county sheriff personally intervened. She died. Her family's suit survived repeated attempts at dismissal and settled in 2023 for $7 million — a record figure for this company, according to Prison Legal News's own tracking, though other families who sued LaSalle over deaths at the same jail settled on undisclosed, confidential terms.

Recorded for accuracy. Not every prisoner released to a hospital before death is evidence of deliberate reporting evasion; critically ill patients are sometimes transferred for genuine medical reasons unrelated to liability. What TCJS documented, and what this entry relies on, is a pattern the Commission itself characterized as evasive, corroborated by falsified records and un-taken training separately confirmed in the same investigations — not a single ambiguous transfer. Source: Prison Legal News (Jan. 2024), read in full, citing Mathis v. Southwestern Correctional, LLC, 2021 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 172515 (E.D. Tex.), and Texas Commission on Jail Standards investigative findings.

Extends the WFAA/Bi-State entry above — the same company, a third facility, years earlier

Falsified logs, and footage that was not retained

The Bi-State Jail entry above documents LaSalle Corrections releasing dying detainees before death to dodge a reporting requirement. This entry documents the same company, years earlier, at a different Texas facility, doing something more direct: falsifying the record of what happened during a death, rather than simply avoiding the paperwork that would follow one.

Gourgen Mirimanian, a 54-year-old Armenian national, died April 10, 2018 at LaSalle-operated Prairieland Detention Center. Texas ruled the death natural, from cardiovascular disease. He had complained of “burning, squeezing chest pain” a month earlier; medical staff documented no abnormal findings despite the complaint. A lawsuit his family filed, after a four-year fight for records, found that most video surveillance of the event was not retained by LaSalle. What limited footage did survive showed medical staff did not arrive until more than thirty minutes after officials found him unresponsive — contradicting ICE's own public death report, which stated a response time of minutes. The same lawsuit found that several facility officials had falsified logs, recording that they had performed required visual checks on Mirimanian in the hours before his death.

Mirimanian's case is not isolated within the broader record. A 2024 report by the ACLU, Physicians for Human Rights, and American Oversight — reviewing more than 14,500 pages of documents on 52 deaths in ICE custody between 2017 and 2021 — found a documented pattern of destroyed or withheld records across multiple facilities and operators, and characterized conditions in some of the underlying inspection reports as “barbaric” and “negligent,” including one case of a person returned to general population with an open surgical wound and no bandage.

Recorded for accuracy. Texas's official cause-of-death finding — natural causes, cardiovascular disease — has not been overturned by any court, and this entry does not assert Mirimanian was killed rather than died of the condition his own medical history documented; the falsified logs and missing footage are allegations from a civil lawsuit, not a criminal finding, though they were specific and detailed enough to survive to litigation rather than being dismissed at the outset. Sources: Prism Reports (Apr. 20, 2023), read directly; Solitary Watch, corroborating the falsified-logs finding from the same underlying lawsuit; Fighting for Civil Rights, on the four-year FOIA fight; American Immigration Lawyers Association, hosting the 2024 ACLU/PHR/American Oversight “Deadly Failures” report.

Relevant to Ch. 1, The Company Town — and directly to The Separate LLC, with a new variant

A children’s facility, run through a nonprofit its own for-profit parent controls

LaSalle Corrections is building a new ICE facility to hold children at England Airpark, Louisiana. The official contractor is not LaSalle Corrections. It is the LaSalle Family Foundation — a nonprofit.

Attorneys and tax-transparency advocates reviewing the arrangement say it is not clear how services the tax-exempt Foundation will provide are differentiated from LaSalle Corrections' ordinary for-profit business. LaSalle Corrections' own Chief Financial Officer, Tim Kurpiewski, confirmed in an email reviewed by the AP that LaSalle Corrections itself — the for-profit company — will be directly involved in operating the facility and ensuring its compliance, despite the nonprofit holding the actual ICE contract. An attorney flagged that questions about the Foundation's tax-exempt status can be raised with the IRS directly, including through its Whistleblower Program.

This is the same structural move The Separate LLC documents elsewhere on this page — one operating company, a distinct legal entity deployed as needed — applied here to a children's detention contract specifically, using nonprofit status rather than a corporate subsidiary as the vehicle. The organization originally slated to run the facility, Compass Connections, is reportedly no longer involved; its board chair was paid $1.7 million in reportable compensation from related organizations in 2024, according to the group's own IRS filing.

Recorded for accuracy. Nonprofit foundations affiliated with for-profit companies are a legal and common structure, and using one to hold a government contract is not, on its own, evidence of wrongdoing; the questions raised here are about transparency and differentiation of services, which have not yet been resolved by any regulator. Source: AP, via the Lemkin Institute and The Queen Zone (both citing the same AP reporting), on the facility, the Foundation, and Kurpiewski's email.

Relevant to Ch. 31, The Contractor’s Hand — a new facility, over $1.2 billion, and a contractor with no relevant experience

$1.2 billion, to the company that replaced the company that failed

Camp East Montana, a large ICE detention facility in El Paso, was first awarded to Acquisition Logistics LLC — a firm ICE's own notice says had no prior experience operating detention facilities. It was removed for poor performance.

Amentum Services, based in Virginia, was “hastily installed” to take over in March 2026, awarded a $452 million initial contract. In July 2026, ICE extended Amentum's contract without competitive bidding through September 2027, at a further potential cost of $776 million — bringing Amentum's total potential payout to more than $1.2 billion for roughly eighteen months of operation. Angélica César, a Human Rights Watch and ACLU fellow who led research documenting abuses at the facility, called the extension “reckless” and evidence the administration was “ignoring well-documented abuses.”

The facility sits on property DHS purchased in nearby Socorro, Texas for approximately $122 million, with a planned capacity of up to 8,500 people — among the largest detention footprints documented anywhere on this page. El Paso County has separately sued ICE after the agency failed to respond to a public-records request about the facility's location and development, filed after ICE's own automated system claimed it could not process the request during a “federal funding hiatus.”

Recorded for accuracy. ICE's own notice frames the no-bid extension as continuity rather than reward, citing disruption risk in re-competing a contract for an active, large-scale facility; this is a genuine operational consideration for the agency, not merely a pretext, even if it also serves to insulate Amentum from competitive review. No court or inspector general has yet ruled on the specific abuse allegations Human Rights Watch and the ACLU documented. Source: The Washington Post (Jul. 27, 2026), read via the Washington Times' and KTEN's syndication of the same AP wire report after the original returned an access block; Spectrum News on the El Paso County FOIA lawsuit and the Socorro property purchase.

Extends the Camp East Montana entry above — a death classified as homicide, and evidence GAO found missing

“Missing or destroyed”

Camp East Montana's $1.2 billion no-bid contract is already documented above. What the facility's own oversight has since found is worse than the contract dispute alone suggested.

A Fordham Law School delegation that visited in early 2026 reported three deaths in custody within a two-month span — one, in January, classified as a homicide by the county medical examiner. The delegation separately found that some detainees on their screening list had become untraceable: they had been transferred to other facilities or simply disappeared from ICE's own online locator system while still, presumably, in the agency's custody.

The Government Accountability Office released its own findings on the same facility in June 2026. Beyond documenting millions of dollars wasted through poor planning, GAO found that after a detainee died from use of force in January, the facility did not produce the incident reports ICE itself requires, and that “evidence associated with the incident was missing or destroyed.” ICE's own response to the report: it concurred with GAO's recommendations, without disputing the finding.

A separate 84-page report from Human Rights Watch and the ACLU, released in July 2026, found that 90% of detainees interviewed reported being beaten or witnessing others being beaten. The report describes guards using collective punishment — striking or assaulting multiple detainees after accusing one individual of a rules violation — and staff pressuring or coercing detainees into abandoning valid asylum claims and accepting removal to third countries, under threat of violence, criminal prosecution, or indefinite detention if they refused. An earlier oversight inspection, in February 2026, had already cited 49 separate deficiencies in the facility's use of force, restraints, and medical care — and still rated the facility “acceptable/adequate,” recommending only that ICE “work with the new contractor to resolve the deficiencies that remain outstanding.”

Recorded for accuracy. The February inspection's own findings, cited above, specifically rejected one common detainee complaint — that food portions were inadequate — after the facility's subcontractor provided a dietitian's certification that caloric provision met federal standards; not every detainee allegation in this cluster of reporting has been independently substantiated, and this entry does not treat all of them as equally established. The GAO's finding on missing evidence is the government's own conclusion, not an advocacy characterization, which is why this entry treats it as the strongest single fact in the cluster. Sources: El Paso Matters (Feb. 24, 2026), the Fordham delegation's own account; Associated Press, via the Texas Tribune (Apr. 3 and Jul. 15, 2026); Christian Science Monitor (Jun. 17, 2026), on the GAO report; American Immigration Council, on the broader custody-death count.

Relevant to Ch. 31, The Contractor’s Hand — the mechanism documented above at Bi-State Jail, now made federal policy

The reporting rule that existed to stop this, eliminated

The WFAA entry above documents LaSalle Corrections releasing dying detainees before death specifically to avoid triggering a jail's mandatory death-reporting requirement. This entry documents the identical mechanism, adopted as explicit written policy by ICE itself, nationwide.

In 2021, the Biden administration required ICE to report and investigate any former detainee's death occurring within 30 days of release — adopted, in the words of then-acting ICE chief of staff Deborah Fleischaker, specifically “to make clear that ICE should not release people simply to avoid deaths in custody.” The rule followed the 2021 death of Martin Vargas Arellano, who died three days after release from GEO Group's Adelanto facility — the same Adelanto already documented on this page under a federal court order to provide clean water, soap, and medical care. On June 4, 2026, acting ICE Director David Venturella issued a memo eliminating that requirement entirely. DHS's own stated justification: “when an individual is no longer in ICE custody then ICE will no longer be responsible for monitoring or reviewing deaths that may occur. This is common sense. ICE is not responsible when an individual passes away weeks after leaving their custody.”

The timing is precise rather than incidental. Eighteen ICE detainees died in the first five months of 2026 alone, 48 since the administration returned to office — a study published in JAMA the prior month found 2025 was already the deadliest year in ICE custody in at least two decades, with 2026 on pace to exceed it. A CNN investigation found many of the deaths appeared preventable; DHS, GEO Group, and CoreCivic have each declined to release basic data on medical staffing levels to state investigators, lawmakers, or the press. Two days before the policy change was reported, GEO Group's CEO George Zoley told investors the company was reopening Adelanto — the facility whose 2021 death prompted the rule now eliminated — and called it “the most successful period for new business wins in our Company's history,” with 2026 expected to be “very active” as well.

Recorded for accuracy. DHS's underlying legal position — that an agency's monitoring responsibility properly ends when its custody does — is a coherent bureaucratic principle applied elsewhere in government, not invented for this case; whether it is the right principle for a population released directly from acute medical crises, as several documented deaths involved, is the substance of the dispute rather than something this entry resolves on its own. DHS states ICE “remains committed to transparency regarding detainee deaths” and that procedures remain in place for timely reporting of deaths that do occur in custody. Sources: The Washington Post (Jun. 4–5, 2026); CNN, ABC News, and PEOPLE, corroborating the same memo and DHS statement; Prison Legal News (Jul. 1, 2026). The GEO earnings-call quote and its connection to Adelanto is drawn from PEOPLE's reporting.

Relevant to Ch. 31, The Contractor’s Hand — nine facilities, one field office, 98% for-profit

6,200 interviews, and the office all nine facilities answer to

Winn, Angola, and Camp East Montana are documented individually elsewhere on this page. This entry documents the office all of them, and six more Louisiana facilities besides, answer to — and the investigation methodical enough to make the pattern across all nine impossible to dismiss as isolated incidents.

“Inside the Black Hole,” a 2024 report from Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights, the ACLU, the ACLU of Louisiana, Immigration Services & Legal Advocacy, and the National Immigration Project, is built on 59 onsite jail visits conducted 2022 to 2024 and interviews with more than 6,200 detained individuals across nine facilities under the jurisdiction of the New Orleans ICE Field Office. Close to 98% of Louisiana's more than 7,000 daily detainees — the second-highest detained population of any state, after Texas — are held in for-profit facilities run by GEO Group or LaSalle Corrections. Documented findings include five-point shackles fastened over open wounds, solitary confinement lasting months for people who had requested medical care, and hygiene products withheld as a form of punishment.

The Central Louisiana ICE Processing Center, run by GEO Group, is singled out with a specific distinction: for years it recorded the highest number of sexual and physical abuse complaints to a national hotline of any ICE facility in the country. In one 2020 incident, guards at the facility used pepper spray against detainees during a presentation on COVID-19 safety. Mahmoud Khalil — whose Ku Klux Klan Act lawsuit against Stephen Miller and Marco Rubio is documented elsewhere on this page — was held at a Louisiana facility within this same field office's jurisdiction.

RFK Human Rights president Kerry Kennedy, describing a 2025 facility tour: a woman whose doctor had flagged a possible colon cancer diagnosis had been requesting a specialist appointment for four and a half months without success; a separate woman who entered the facility able to walk unassisted now requires a wheelchair, with no explanation given for the change. In March 2026, the ACLU of Louisiana sent formal demand letters to the state's ICE facilities over systemic denial of legal counsel access, citing months-long delays receiving legal documents and unreliable attorney phone systems. Legal Director Nora Ahmed: “This administration is throwing people into detention facilities that operate like black holes.”

Recorded for accuracy. This report's findings are self-reported by detained individuals to advocacy organizations with an explicit position calling for the facilities' closure, not independently verified by a neutral government body; that does not make the findings false, but the sample was not randomly selected and detainees with the most serious complaints may be overrepresented relative to the full detained population. ICE has not, in the sources reviewed for this entry, offered a comprehensive response to the report's specific findings. The sheer scale of the underlying data collection — 6,200 interviews across 59 site visits over three years — is unusual for advocacy-sourced documentation and is one reason this entry treats the pattern as more than anecdotal, even while preserving this caveat about methodology. Sources: National Immigration Project (Apr. 2025 press release); ACLU and ACLU of Louisiana (Aug. 2024); Louisiana Illuminator (Aug. 11, 2025), on Kerry Kennedy's account; Robert & Ethel Kennedy Human Rights Center's own site materials (2026), including the ACLU-LA legal-counsel demand letters and the CLIPC-specific findings.

Extends the Tacoma entry above — the ruling that followed it, and the contract written the next morning to override the ruling

A judge said a contract can’t do this. The next morning, ICE wrote a new one that tries.

The Tacoma facility already documented above, and the state's three-year fight to inspect it, reached a ruling. What ICE did with that ruling is the most direct piece of open defiance documented anywhere on this page.

On July 9, 2026, U.S. District Judge Benjamin Settle ordered GEO Group to admit Washington state health inspectors to the Tacoma facility — after three years of litigation, ten refused inspection attempts, and roughly 3,500 detainee complaints. Settle found GEO had signed a new contract with ICE in the middle of the lawsuit specifically to support an argument that ICE, not GEO, controlled building access — and that GEO's own court filing had omitted part of a separate contract provision in which ICE agreed to ask the Justice Department to get GEO dismissed from lawsuits entirely. His ruling: “Preemption requires Congressional intent, not a contract,” and GEO's new contract “cannot preempt state law, even if it purports to.”

The next morning, July 10, ICE published draft contract terms covering 5,500 detention beds across four states — Washington, Colorado, Florida, and Pennsylvania — declaring that state and local laws “shall not apply” to the facilities' operations. The bid process is structured as competitive, but a 30-day requirement to begin housing detainees leaves no realistic opening for a new operator, and the required bed counts and locations match GEO Group's existing facilities in Tacoma, Aurora, Pompano Beach, and Philipsburg exactly. The new standards restrict outside inspection to federal personnel and ICE-approved third parties only, explicitly barring state and local authorities — and permit facilities to operate at 85% staffing, including medical staff.

A Ninth Circuit judge temporarily paused Settle's inspection order on July 21 while GEO's appeal proceeds; a decision on a longer stay was expected in early August. DHS spokesperson Lauren Bis has attributed the broader contracting strategy directly to state legislative efforts, saying “sanctuary politicians” “continue to push legislation to outlaw or make private prisons financially infeasible” — an on-record admission that the new contract terms are a response to exactly the kind of state law they now declare inapplicable.

The pattern is not confined to Washington. California banned new for-profit prison contracts starting January 1, 2026. Days before the ban took effect, a federal procurement website posted $6.8 billion in new long-term ICE contracts for facilities in San Diego, Calexico, Adelanto, and Bakersfield — the same Adelanto already documented elsewhere on this page. ICE spokeswoman Paige Hughes: “State laws aimed at obstructing federal law enforcement are inappropriate and harmful.”

Recorded for accuracy. ICE and GEO Group maintain a genuine legal position that federal immigration detention is subject to federal, not state, regulatory authority under preemption doctrine — a real and unresolved area of law, not a position invented for this dispute, and the Ninth Circuit's stay of Settle's own order shows at least one appellate judge found the underlying legal question serious enough to pause enforcement pending review. This entry does not assert the “shall not apply” contract language is definitively unlawful; it records that it was published one day after a federal judge ruled the identical legal theory does not work, which is a fact independent of how the broader preemption question is ultimately resolved. Sources: WIRED (Jul. 29, 2026), the original reporting, read via Apple News redirect to the full story; IBTimes UK and PJ Media, corroborating the contract terms and Judge Settle's ruling; govbrief.today, on the timeline; CBS News/AP, on the parallel California contracts.

Extends the Adelanto and Monitor Confirms material above — the actual dollar figures behind the facilities already documented

$1.327 billion, one company, one year, straight from the government’s own ledger

Federal spending records on USASpending.gov — the government's own contract-payment database — show GEO Group received a combined $1,327,259,870 in award payments over the twelve months ending August 2026. The five largest individual task orders make the underlying facilities already documented on this page concrete in dollar terms.

Detention and transportation services at Adelanto, the facility already documented above for its force-related deaths and the reporting-rule elimination that followed one of them, accounted for two separate task orders alone: $107.7 million for Los Angeles-area detention and transportation, and $69.3 million for detention services specifically. A new task order established July 24, 2026 added $36 million for detention services at the Mesa Verde and Golden State facilities in the San Francisco area — on top of an existing $76.85 million task order for the same two facilities, bringing that cluster alone to more than $112 million. Separately, GEO's subsidiary-run Intensive Supervision Appearance Program — ankle monitors and check-in supervision for people released rather than detained — drew $108.3 million on its own, the single largest task order in the past year.

The same records show comparatively modest recent insider activity: GEO's own insiders traded company stock once in the past six months, a sale, not a purchase — company director Scott Michael Kernan sold 6,633 shares for roughly $101,000. Institutional ownership has moved more actively: UBS Group added more than 6 million shares in Q1 2026, a 178% increase in its position, while Barrow Hanley Mewhinney & Strauss exited its entire position of nearly 4 million shares the same quarter.

Recorded for accuracy. Contract payments for detention and supervision services are lawful, budgeted federal expenditures under contracts already documented elsewhere on this page as controversial in their award process, not evidence of new wrongdoing on their own; this entry documents scale, not impropriety. Institutional trading activity reflects normal portfolio management by hundreds of investment firms and does not, on its own, indicate any view on the underlying immigration-detention business specifically. Source: Quiver Quantitative (Aug. 3, 2026), aggregating USASpending.gov federal contract-payment data directly; SEC Form 4 insider-trading filings; SEC Form 13F institutional-holdings filings.