When a group of men without uniforms arrested Mahmoud Khalil inside his New York City apartment building in March, Khalil’s wife, eight months pregnant, asked them for identification. The men would not give their names or say what agency they worked for. All they said was they were taking Khalil, a legal permanent resident, to an immigrant lockup in downtown Manhattan.
The statement was misleading. Within hours, Khalil was whisked out of the state. He soon found himself in the Central Louisiana ICE Processing Center. The Columbia University graduate student, who had attracted nationwide attention by leading pro-Palestinian protests on campus and was not accused of any crime, spent more than three months imprisoned in the facility.
Central Louisiana is a for-profit detention center, owned and operated by Geo Group, America’s largest private prison company. Geo first opened the facility as a juvenile prison in 1998, but it was shut down a year and a half later after a federal investigation found it was so dangerous that children were mutilating themselves just to get sent to the relative safety of the infirmary. Not wanting its prison inventory to sit idle for long, Geo Group reopened it in 2007 to hold immigrants instead.
Khalil’s imprisonment made him just one of thousands of immigrants who find themselves locked up in a Geo Group facility at any given moment. And George Zoley, the company’s founder and executive chairman, sees them as a once-in-a-lifetime boon to the business he has been building for decades.
