The private prison giant Geo Group has signed a multiyear contract with the Trump administration to reopen a shuttered prison in Hudson, Colorado, and turn it into an immigration detention center.
The long-expected agreement will nearly double U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s immigrant detention capacity in Colorado. The new “Big Horn Contract Detention Center” will hold up to 1,188 detainees, Geo said in a news release Monday morning, on top of the 1,530 beds available at the state’s only other immigrant holding facility in Aurora, also operated by Geo.
The five-year contract between ICE and the company was signed Thursday and is worth up to $528.6 million, according to federal contracting records. Geo, in turn, will begin paying $250,000 in monthly rent to the company that owns the prison, the Chicago-based Highlands REIT, a real estate investment trust, later this year.
Once the prison opens and begins housing detainees, Highlands will receive more than $958,000 per month, according to federal securities filings. That will increase by 3% each year.
Hudson is a small town roughly 30 miles northeast of Denver, and it has been a target for ICE’s expanded detention efforts for more than a year. Those rumored plans have prompted repeat protests outside the facility’s closed gates, and they’ve also sparked criticism from elected officials in the state and discussions by lawmakers about how to stop ICE from reactivating the long-dormant facility.
Shortly after Geo’s announcement Monday, a community group said it would organize a protest at the prison early Wednesday evening.
Hudson town manager Bryce Lange referred The Denver Post to a statement released by the town Monday morning. The statement said the town “has not received detailed operational information directly from federal agencies” and that the town didn’t know when the facility would open; how many detainees it would house; or what impacts it would have on local utilities, transportation volumes and emergency services.
“Town leadership recognizes that residents have strong and deeply personal views about immigration detention facilities,” the statement reads. “The Town’s role is not to determine federal immigration policy.”
A spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, did not return messages seeking comment.
Geo spokesman Christopher Ferreira referred The Post to the company’s news release. In that announcement, CEO George C. Zoley said the new Hudson facility would “play an important role in helping meet the need for increased federal immigration processing center bedspace.”
The company expects to make roughly $85 million from the facility in its first full year of operation, “excluding transportation revenue.”
In an early community update posted in March, Hudson officials repeatedly said they had no power to stop the facility from reopening. State officials have similarly said they could do little to block Geo, Highlands and ICE from reaching an agreement regarding privately owned property.
Geo’s press release did not say when the facility would open. The lease between Geo and Highlands REIT begins Aug. 1 and will last for 88 months, according to securities filings.
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The signed contracts finalize the long-expected reopening of the prison. Members of Colorado’s congressional delegation were told last year that the facility would be reopened as a detention center, and records obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union of Colorado indicated that ICE signed a six-month letter contract for the facility in December.
Andrea Loya, the executive director of Casa de Paz, which works with ICE detainees in Aurora, said advocates had seen trucks ferrying supplies to the Hudson facility starting in February.
She and other immigrant-rights advocates, who’ve previously raised concerns about the conditions in the Aurora facility, were alarmed that Geo was opening another detention center in the state. Alex Sánchez, of the Voces Unidas immigrant advocacy group, criticized the company’s “undignified treatment and horrible conditions.”
“It’s just a shame,” Loya said Monday. “We already know that the Geo facility does not have the capacity to correctly manage the folks that it detains here in Aurora, and so honestly, it’s really concerning that we’re going to have a facility that far out, with the number of emergency calls per week, per day, that we witness every day (in Aurora).”
The facility will be used exclusively by ICE, which had been looking for an additional detention center in Colorado for more than a year. Amid speculation that the Hudson facility might be reopened, Democratic state legislators passed a new law requiring more oversight of immigrant detention facilities in the state.
Last month, Geo filed a lawsuit challenging the state’s authority to impose new requirements — which include improved medical care and outside inspections — on the company, given its role as a federal contractor.
“Unfortunately, expanding ICE facilities in Colorado will have serious consequences for our communities, which are already shell-shocked from the Trump administration’s ruthless and chaotic ICE raids,” Sánchez said in a statement.
The signed contract comes more than a year after ICE said it was looking for additional detention bed space in Colorado. The Aurora facility expanded its bed capacity to 1,530 last year and has routinely been full or nearly at capacity, advocates have previously said. The search for additional bed space quickly honed in on the Hudson facility, a onetime private prison run by Geo. It has been shuttered for more than a decade.
The Trump administration’s mass-deportation efforts have been a boon to Geo Group. In a May earnings call, Zoley said the company signed contracts worth $520 million in incremental annual revenue last year, the most in its history. As of that call, Geo had 26,000 beds under contract with ICE.
Once the Hudson facility opens, roughly 10% of them will be in Colorado.
In December, the Geo subsidiary BI Incorporated, which is based in Boulder, signed a two-year, $121 million contract with ICE to provide “skip-tracing” services. The company provides ankle monitors and supervision to ICE detainees who are on supervised release, and skip-tracing involves tracking down a detainee’s location.
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