In 1987, the Wackenhut Corporation's new corrections division wins its first federal contract from the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) to design, construct, and manage an immigration detention center in Aurora, Colorado. The facility, built in just 150 days with a design capacity of 150-200 beds, marks the critical transition point where a private intelligence and security firm pivots from surveillance and investigations into the business of physical detention -- a shift with enormous consequences for the subsequent privatization of immigration enforcement.
The Aurora contract represents the convergence of two streams of privatization. Wackenhut had spent three decades as a private intelligence firm -- maintaining dossiers on millions of Americans, providing security services, and conducting investigations for corporate and government clients. The corrections division, formed in 1984 under the leadership of George C. Zoley (who would later become GEO Group's CEO), sought to apply the same privatization logic to incarceration: if intelligence and security could be outsourced profitably, so could the physical confinement of human beings.
The Reagan administration's INS was an eager partner. The same ideological commitment to privatization that drove EO 12333 and the broader deregulation agenda made the administration receptive to private detention. The Aurora contract established the template: a private firm designs, builds, and operates a facility on behalf of the federal government, with per-bed-per-day payment structures that create financial incentives to maximize occupancy.
Wackenhut formally incorporated its corrections subsidiary in Florida in April 1988, and quickly expanded. By 1988-1989, the company had won contracts for two additional 500-bed facilities in Texas. The subsidiary went public on NASDAQ in 1994, and in 2004 rebranded as The GEO Group. By 2026, GEO Group operates approximately 80,000 beds across 99 facilities, making it the largest private prison operator in the United States and one of the primary beneficiaries of immigration enforcement spending.
The Wackenhut-to-GEO trajectory illustrates a pattern central to intelligence privatization: firms that begin with surveillance capabilities evolve into full-service instruments of state coercion, with each new contract expanding the scope of privatized government power. The same company that maintained files on four million suspected dissidents in the 1960s was, by the late 1980s, physically detaining immigrants -- a progression from watching to caging that would accelerate dramatically after 9/11.