Money

Punch Up  A private prison giant that runs a sprawling network of ICE jails has sparked allegations of “corruption” after it funneled $1 million to a Donald Trump-aligned fund for the midterms, PunchUp and Migrant Insider can reveal. The timing of GEO Group’s donation has set off alarm bells—it came just as news broke that the company was about to lose out on lucrative contracts.

In the first five months of fiscal 2026 alone, the immigration detention center monolith held more than $1 billion in obligated ICE contracts, an OpenSecrets analysis found, placing it second only to CSI Aviation among the agency’s top vendors.

The seven-figure payment from its subsidiary, GEO Reentry Services LLC, was recorded as received by MAGA Inc. on March 9—the same day The Washington Post reported that the Trump administration had frozen the parent company out of $426 million in new ICE contracts. GEO Group has not received any new contracts since.

The Post also revealed that Department of Homeland Security officials had been privately pressuring GEO to slash prices on its existing contracts by 15 percent. By the end of the day, GEO’s core business model had been publicly called into question—the latest in a cascade of bad news that had seen the company’s share price lose more than half its value from its post-election peak, and it underwent a change at the top.

While federal law bars contractors from donating directly to federal candidates or super PACs, GEO Group has long relied on a loophole, routing money through corporate subsidiaries that do not hold government contracts, and has done so for around a decade.