GEO Group Appears to be Using Solitary Confinement as Retaliation

Welcome to our news segment: TL;DR of Immigration News, for when the news is Too Long and you Didn’t Read it.

This is a weekly collection of immigration-related news stories. These bite-size summaries will keep you up to date without overwhelming your inbox.
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Inside Delaney Hall’s Black Box

We are on day 19 of a hunger strike at Delaney Hall, a notorious ICE detention center in Newark NJ. As protests rage outside the prison in solidarity with the hunger and labor strikers inside, New Jersey elected officials have been trying to both inspect the conditions of Delaney Hall and get answers on the status of the health and well being of prisoners for their loved ones on the outside.

NJ Senator Andy Kim was denied entry to Delaney Hall until he directly called Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin to be admitted. However, when he was finally let inside, the guards not only wouldn’t let him talk to any of the prisoners, they also wouldn’t answer any of his questions about why prisoners weren’t getting proper medical care or access to ipads so they could take video calls with their loved ones. “This is our money going to detain these people, and we’re not getting any answers,” Kim said. “I’m not getting answers on behalf of you, on behalf of other Americans, on behalf of the families of those that are detained.”

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People speaking about conditions in ICE facilities keep getting put in solitary confinement

Two separate stories from the past week share the same pattern: ICE and its chief contractor GEO Group allegedly using solitary confinement (which is considered torture under international law) to punish detainees for speaking out about conditions in detention facilities.

At Moshannon Valley Processing Center in Pennsylvania, GEO officials openly admit to punishing detainee Edin Daniel Chinchilla-Roque for attempting to start a hunger strike at the facility. GEO officials running the facility put him in solitary confinement “for inciting a group demonstration,” which Spotlight PA calls “a high offense in ICE’s detention handbook.” Chinchilla-Roque feels that being put in solitary was “a punishment for everything I've been saying, for the information I put out of the prison. Because this is a horrible situation. I won’t give up.”

According to a headline from The Sun, “3 detainees who recently spoke to congressional visitors at Adelanto ICE facility reportedly sent to solitary confinement.” At this facility, also run by GEO Group, detention center employees dressed in riot gear dragged away three prisoners, specifically targeting people who had talked to concerned members of Congress, locking the prisoners in solitary. Melissa Shepard of Immigrant Defenders Law Center was quoted by the Sun: “[T]hey were clearly targeted for their participation in talking with the congressional representatives… [Solitary confinement] is a punishment and used clearly as a deterrent for behaviors that [facility workers] don’t want to tolerate. ”

An anonymous hunger striker quoted by the Sun remains defiant: “They try to put fear in us by threatening us with [solitary confinement], taking commissary away, etc. But we [are] all pulling strong and day by day we [are] getting more people on board to peacefully protest from inside the facility.”
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Immigration courts use ‘mega masters’ to speed deportations

A master hearing is a session in which an immigration judge hears multiple cases. Among other functions, an expulsion may be ordered or (rarely) voluntary departure granted. Then the individual (called a ‘respondent’) is given a date for an “individual or merits” hearing in which there is one respondent and the merits of the case are presented. Each respondent in a master hearing usually gets 3-5 minutes. An individual hearing can take up to 20 minutes.

This process is too slow to meet the current regime’s expulsion quotas. This has led to massive sessions, which are being called ‘mega master’ hearings. These sessions include 100 or more people with no additional time for the judge to hear respondents. These new hearings largely target people without lawyers representing them. Those who show up late to the session, or not at all, because they got a notice in a language they don’t speak, are receiving removal orders without any opportunity to present their side of the situation.

The people called into these ‘mega master’ sessions are often people who are working through the system and expected to have court dates in the future - sometimes as far out as 2028. They have no warning that their case is being accelerated and no opportunity to get ready.

Immigrants are already denied most due process rights by the current racist system. “Mega masters” will only make that worse. People without lawyers may not realize what options they have, may waive appeals they could make, or may sign papers that condemn themselves without realizing the risks. All in the name of meeting some arbitrary and unjustified quota of harm to our neighbors.
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Advocates Call for Boycott of Citizens Bank for Financing ICE Jails

A growing boycott against Citizens Bank is part of a campaign to pressure it to divest from financing CoreCivic and GEO Group, two of the nation’s largest private operators of ICE jails.

Julie Cohen, an Oscar-nominated film director, and her husband, Paul Barrett, a former reporter with The Wall Street Journal, gave an interview about their decision to close their accounts at Citizens Bank over its financial involvement with ICE.

According to Barrett, Citizens Bank has helped provide some $2 billion in financing for GEO Group and CoreCivic.

Goodman notes that the CEO of GEO Group, David Donahue, claimed last year that Delaney Hall, which is run by GEO, could represent an additional $130 million in annual revenue. Barrett and Cohen want to see Citizens Bank walk away from their relationship with GEO. Barrett noted that communities in multiple states are successfully pressuring community officials to put up barriers to these facilities.

Action Item: check out De-ICECitizensBank.org. There are more than 90 protests planned outside Citizens branches all over the country.
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Judge blocks series of Trump policies halting immigration processing

In the ongoing war between the Trump administration and the rule of law, Rhode Island-based U.S. District Judge John McConnell vacated a number of dreadful immigration policies decreed by Trump in November 2025. These included prohibiting any immigration application for those from 39 travel ban countries, halting the ability to get green cards, ending the processing of asylum claims from any country, and insisting on a review of all immigration benefits bestowed to those from the 39 travel ban countries under former President Biden.

While flouting the well-established right of Congress to govern immigration policy, these executive proclamations have had dire effects on many immigrant communities. They impede access to green cards for legal residence as well as naturalization ceremonies for those who have completed the requirements to become US citizens. Many have been unable to immigrate or to claim their rights to asylum under international law.

In stinging remarks, the judge said: “In ruling on these motions, the Court is reminded of a line often repeated in discussions around immigration policy: If people wish to immigrate to the United States, they ought to ‘follow the law’ and ‘do things the right way.’ This case serves as a perfect example of immigrants doing just that. But the rule of law has to apply to everyone equally and, as evident here, USCIS has neither ‘followed the law’ nor ‘done things the right way.’ Indeed, the agency has violated the very immigration laws that Congress has charged it with administering.”
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Action items:

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