How private prison company Geo Group built a lucrative side business making digital tools like smart watches and tracking apps to help ICE surveil immigrants
After a Honduran immigrant arrived in the United States in 2022, officials ordered him to use a government-issued app as part of an immigration surveillance program. Bluesky: @hypervisible , @marypcbuk , @crookedfootball , and @justinhendrix X: @paulmozur and @paulmozur Bluesky: @hypervisible : Geo Group has built “a lucrative side business of digital tools — including ankle monitors, smart watches and tracking apps — to surveil immigrants on behalf of the federal government.” Mary Branscombe / @marypcbuk : The surveillance capitalism is rarely so obvious [embedded post] Chris Bertram / @crookedfootball : There is no surveillance of immigrants that does not involve surveillance of the non-immigrants with whom they associate. The technology, developed in the prison system and extended to immigrants will surely be used to monitor ordinary US citizens directly, sooner rather than later Justin Hendrix / @justinhendrix : “To diversify, Geo Group turned to digital surveillance. In 2011, the firm paid $415 million for Behavioral Interventions, a Colorado company founded in the 1970s to track cattle and which had expanded to monitoring parolees.” X: Paul Mozur / @paulmozur : The US' largest private prison operator, Geo Group, runs one of its largest immigrant surveillance programs. Now, ICE is using the privately run system to track and deport growing numbers of people. 200k are currently in the system. Geo expects it to grow. https://www.nytimes.com/... Paul Mozur / @paulmozur : For Geo Group, the surveillance is a profit center. Its margins on the service are about 50%. For an immigrant to send a checkin selfie, it charges the US government $1. Sources said managers pressure employees to rush thru immigrant oversight procedures. It was all about numbers
Context & Ripple Effects
ICE’s use of app-based supervision predates this report: Shadowtrack and SmartLink were already being used as alternatives to GPS ankle bracelets. Later coverage said SmartLINK coincided with a sharp expansion in the number of people tracked, making digital check-ins an operationally consequential form of immigration enforcement rather than a minor convenience.
This report places that model inside Geo Group’s business strategy, connecting its acquisition of Behavioral Interventions to a broader portfolio of monitoring hardware and software. It also adds economic and workplace context to the earlier reported scaling of SmartLINK-based monitoring.
First-order effects
- Immigrants enrolled in ICE supervision face a privately operated mix of app check-ins, wearable devices, and location-monitoring tools; Geo Group captures revenue from each service interaction, including reported selfie check-ins.
- Geo Group gains a higher-margin digital business alongside detention and supervision operations, while employees reportedly face pressure to process oversight procedures against numeric targets.
Second-order effects
- App-based supervision can make monitoring easier to deploy at scale than hardware-only programs, reinforcing procurement demand for vendors that combine case-management workflows, tracking, and devices.
- The reported economics give contractors an incentive to favor frequent, digitally mediated compliance tasks; oversight bodies will have to assess whether operational targets distort monitoring decisions and due process.
Third-order effects
- If this model persists, immigration enforcement may increasingly rely on private vendors whose recurring software and data services are embedded in government supervision, not just on facility operators.
- The case strengthens concerns that monitoring tools developed for detention and immigration control can become reusable infrastructure for broader government surveillance, though the extent of any expansion remains uncertain.
The trend: Private corrections contractors are evolving into recurring-revenue surveillance vendors by packaging physical monitoring, apps, and compliance workflows for government enforcement programs.