Geo Group reports nearly 54,000 immigrants on ICE ankle monitors

Ankle monitor shift boosted Geo Group’s ICE contract revenues

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is tracking nearly 54,000 immigrants through GPS-enabled ankle monitors, up from about 17,000 in early 2025, according to figures The Geo Group reported Thursday on an earnings call. The private prison corporation, whose BI Inc subsidiary operates ICE’s intensive supervision appearance program (ISAP), said the increase reflects a shift of participants from less intensive surveillance such as phone check-ins.

The overall number of immigrants enrolled in the surveillance program remained flat at about 184,000. Geo Group executives said a large number of participants had been shifted from less intensive forms of monitoring to ankle monitors, which the company pitches as a “high-security level of monitoring.”

The shift has increased revenues for Geo Group. Ankle monitors cost ICE more than most of the other surveillance technologies administered by BI Inc, and the company charges ICE a little more than $2 a day per monitor. Its SmartLink app, a facial recognition and location tracking smartphone application, costs about $0.96 for each immigrant enrolled, according to publicly available ICE statistics. At last count, more than 127,000 immigrants were required to check in using SmartLink.

“If this trend continues, the technology and case management mix shift will continue to increase revenues and earnings generated under the ISAP contract even if overall participation counts remain relatively stable,” George Zoley, Geo Group chairman and CEO, said on the earnings call Thursday.

ICE directed agents in June 2025 to move more immigrants enrolled in ISAP to the ankle monitor program, according to a memo obtained by the Washington Post. Anticipating greater reliance on the devices, Geo Group began investing in building out its inventory of the GPS monitors at the start of 2025. The company said at the time that it was investing $16 million into manufacturing enough ankle monitors to “be in a position to scale up the federal government’s utilization of ISAP by several hundreds of thousands to upwards of several millions of participants as required.”

In a class action lawsuit filed against ICE in June, immigration advocacy groups allege that the “ankle monitors for all” policy “imposes continuous, real-time GPS monitoring without individualized justifications.” Individuals are being subjected to constant surveillance “without meaningful review, explanation, or opportunity to challenge these conditions,” according to a statement announcing the lawsuit. That includes pregnant women, who The Guardian first reported were being fitted with smart watches.

“ICE has offered no justification for their ‘ankle monitors for all’ policy, but it serves their interest in making daily life harder for immigrants, while also increasing profits for their friends in the private prison industry,” Evan Benz, managing attorney at the Amica Center for Immigrant Rights, said in a statement announcing the lawsuit.

The Guardian said it has reached out to the Department of Homeland Security for comment.

While the company’s prediction of an increase in the use of ankle monitors has started to pan out, investors on Thursday expressed concern about the lack of growth in the overall number of immigrants being monitored through ISAP. Geo Group executives previously said they expected the Trump administration’s immigration agenda to produce a surge in enrollment that would allow the program to surpass its previous peak of 370,000 under the Biden administration. The company said it believed there would be enough demand from the U.S. government to expand the surveillance program to monitor more than 400,000 immigrants.

Without going into specifics, Zoley said he was optimistic that recent shifts in policy could increase the number of people who “would be subject to immigration enforcement,” adding that “at a later point, maybe next year, we could see ISAP increase dramatically.” The Trump administration has most recently revoked Temporary Protected Status for Haitians, potentially subjecting hundreds of thousands of people in the U.S. to detention or deportation. Company executives have said in the past that they expect the number of immigrants enrolled in ISAP to grow once the government runs out of capacity in detention centers.

ISAP was first introduced as an alternative to detention and has been operated by BI Inc since 2004. The program relies on several forms of monitoring in addition to the GPS ankle monitors, including smart watches that provide real-time location tracking and a smartphone app.

People in the program have reported that the ankle monitors, designed and produced by BI, can overheat, shock them or have been put on too tightly, and that there is little government oversight over the program. The Guardian’s report included a photograph of José Contreras, 30, of Edinburg, Texas, showing the ankle monitor placed on him after he was brought back from Honduras in July 2026.