GEO Group Signs 5-Year, $80M/Year ICE Contract for Rivers Correctional in Hertford County, NC, Over Governor Stein's Objection

GEO Group confirmed a signed 5-year contract giving ICE exclusive access to the shuttered Rivers Correctional Institution in Winton, Hertford County, North Carolina — one of the largest ICE detention facilities planned on the East Coast, at 1,400 beds. The contract is projected to generate roughly $80 million in annual revenue for GEO Group. Governor Josh Stein has said he “does not want it in our state,” but the contract closes the facility’s fight-stage from resisting to signed. Rivers Correctional previously operated as a Bureau of Prisons facility until its 2021 closure amid officer-violence and contraband investigations.

The signing follows the plan’s announcement (2026-07-24–ice-plans-1400-bed-rivers-correctional-hertford-nc) and the community mobilization that followed within days (2026-07-22–hertford-county-nc-community-mobilizes-against-rivers-correctional) — community rallies did not stop the contract from closing. Correction, 2026-08-28: this entry previously cross-referenced Rivers’s BOP-era abuse record to “the same contractor implicated in the Fort Bliss guard-betting-on-deaths findings.” That is wrong on two counts — GEO Group (Rivers) and Amentum (Fort Bliss) are different contractors, and the guard-betting allegation was itself corrected out of the Fort Bliss entry on 2026-08-27 (it belongs to a different source, NPR, describing a different facility). Rivers Correctional’s abuse record stands independently: DOJ OIG Report 16-06 (August 2016) found it had the highest rates in its cohort of contraband finds, staff assaults, uses of force, discipline findings, grievances, positive drug tests, and inmate-on-inmate sexual misconduct (verify-rivers-correctional-hertford-abuse-history-contract-terms-findings) — a documented history in its own right, without needing a borrowed cross-reference to another facility’s contractor. The contract’s shape does still repeat a pattern this corpus has documented elsewhere: a state governor’s public opposition carries no legal weight against a federal detention contract signed directly with a private operator, confirmed here as a direct GEO Group-to-ICE sole-source award (PIID 70CDCR26FR0000108) with no intervening county or state party.