Investigation - Detention & Oversight

Dead on Record: The Private Prison That Killed Three Men, Falsified Safety Checks, and Got Paid More

GEO Group staff at a Pennsylvania ICE facility fabricated 23 safety inspections before a detainee died. ICE found four violations. Then ICE gave GEO $4 million more. Two more men died at the same facility. This is what impunity looks like in the private prison industry.

Moshannon Valley ICE Processing Center in Clearfield County, Pennsylvania, is operated by GEO Group, a publicly traded private prison company with billions in federal contracts. Three detainees have died there since 2023. (Photo: Unsplash)

On December 6, 2023, a 37-year-old Cameroonian father of three named Frankline Okpu died in solitary confinement at a federal immigration detention center in rural Pennsylvania. He had been placed there two days earlier after an altercation with a guard. A doctor ordered staff to check on him every fifteen minutes.

They didn't.

Federal investigators reviewing his death later found that 42 percent of the 219 required safety checks never happened. Staff fabricated 23 of them - documenting checks that never occurred at all. In another 33 instances, guards glanced through a cell window and logged it as a full visual inspection. Thirty-eight more were logged outside the required timeframe. When nurses finally did their rounds, they "knocked on Okpu's cell and then all three briefly looked in the window... then walked away without conducting a face-to-face encounter." By 11:15 that morning, a nurse arrived at his cell and found him lying on his side, "clear frothy liquid coming from his mouth." He was declared dead at 12:02 PM.

The facility is Moshannon Valley ICE Processing Center in Clearfield County. The operator is GEO Group - the largest private prison company in America, traded on the New York Stock Exchange, politically connected at the highest levels of the Trump administration. ICE's own death review found four separate detention standards violations and two additional facility policy violations. The agency's conclusion: "These deficiencies are for informational purposes only and should not be construed as contributory to the detainee's death."

Three months after that review was completed, ICE gave GEO Group $4 million more to run the facility. ICE's acting director visited Moshannon and called GEO a "valued partner."

Two more men have since died at Moshannon. No one at GEO Group has faced criminal prosecution for what happened to Frankline Okpu.

The Check That Was Never Made

Inside immigration detention. GEO Group runs dozens of facilities across the US under ICE contracts worth hundreds of millions annually. (Photo: Unsplash)

The morning Okpu died began with a bureaucratic lie. He had a dental appointment. When a resident adviser went to collect him shortly after 7 AM, Okpu did not respond - already a sign something was wrong. The resident adviser told the dental assistant Okpu had "refused" his appointment. The dental assistant completed and signed a refusal form.

She had not witnessed any refusal. She had not visited Okpu. She had not explained the risks of refusing treatment or obtained his signature. When ICE investigators confronted her about this, she explained it was "common practice" at Moshannon to have another staff member sign refusal forms for appointments the patient never knew about, then deliver the completed paperwork later.

This practice directly violated ICE detention standards - the same standards GEO Group is contractually obligated to follow in exchange for federal dollars. But it wasn't an outlier. An ICE Office of Detention Oversight inspection in March 2024, three months after Okpu's death, found the exact same pattern across the facility: non-medical staff carrying out and witnessing refusal forms, preventing detainees from asking medical follow-up questions, failing to have providers present at all. ODO deemed these failures "a priority component."

The 15-minute check logs were worse. Surveillance footage - the kind of objective, timestamp-verified record that cannot be disputed - showed the fabrication in granular detail. Of 219 ordered checks: 94 did not occur at the required intervals. Twenty-three were simply invented. Staff wrote down times and signed their names to welfare checks that nobody performed, on a man who was dying.

"Federal prosecutors have previously indicted GEO staff for falsifying visual inspection logs during the period preceding an incarcerated person's death in custody."

- The Intercept, citing a federal indictment in GEO's Big Spring, Texas facility

The Moshannon falsifications are not, in other words, an accident or a one-time breakdown. They follow a documented pattern at GEO facilities nationwide - a pattern federal prosecutors recognized as criminal at another GEO site in Texas. At Moshannon, ICE investigators found the same conduct, documented it in a report, labeled it non-contributory to death, and walked away.

GEO Group: The Company That Built an Empire on Federal Compliance Failures

The GEO Group, Inc. is headquartered in Boca Raton, Florida. It is publicly traded under the ticker symbol GEO on the New York Stock Exchange. It reported revenues of approximately $2.4 billion in its most recent fiscal year. It operates more than 100 facilities across the United States, holding federal, state, and local prisoners and immigration detainees.

GEO Group is not simply a business. It is a political actor. The company has spent millions lobbying Congress and state legislatures over the past two decades, consistently pushing for tougher immigration enforcement and longer detention stays - policies that directly expand its customer base. When Donald Trump won the 2024 election, GEO Group's stock surged by more than 100 percent in the weeks following his victory, as Wall Street correctly anticipated an explosion in ICE detention capacity.

That prediction proved accurate. Under the Trump administration's immigration crackdown, ICE has been directed to dramatically expand detention bed capacity. GEO Group is one of the primary beneficiaries. The company donated to Trump's inauguration fund. Its executives have cultivated relationships across the Republican establishment for years.

At the federal level, GEO Group has been rewarded even when its facilities fail. The pattern at Moshannon - violations documented, standards found unmet, contracts renewed and expanded - repeats across GEO's portfolio. At GEO's Folkston ICE Processing Center in south Georgia, Jaspal Singh, a 57-year-old man, died of a heart attack on April 16, 2024. An ICE Health Service Corps mortality review found GEO's medical care "deviated beyond safe limits and directly contributed to his death." GEO's response to this finding from the federal agency that employs them: a $50 million facility expansion deal, finalized in 2025 using funds from Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill. Folkston is now on track to become the largest ICE facility in the United States.

This is not a coincidence. This is a system functioning as designed.

Three Deaths, One Facility, Two Years

Moshannon Valley has seen three detainee deaths since December 2023, all under GEO Group management. (Photo: Unsplash)

Frankline Okpu was not the last man to die at Moshannon Valley under GEO Group's watch.

On August 5, 2025, Chaofeng Ge, a 32-year-old Chinese national, died by hanging in a shower room at the facility. He was found with his hands and feet bound behind his back - a detail first reported by Scripps News following an autopsy review. How a man in a detention facility with mandatory oversight wound up hog-tied before dying by apparent suicide has not been publicly explained by GEO Group or ICE.

Then, on December 14, 2025, Sheikh Fouad Saeed Abdulkadir - a 46-year-old imam from Ohio, originally from Eritrea, described by his community as beloved - died at Moshannon. ICE's one-page Detainee Death Report offers a sparse account: Abdulkadir reported chest pain, numbness, and tingling in "early December." An EKG came back abnormal. He "declined recommended admission to the medical housing unit for monitoring." He died two weeks after the abnormal heart reading.

The report does not explain why an immigrant detainee with chest pain and an abnormal EKG was not immediately transferred to an emergency department. It does not explain what follow-up occurred between the EKG and his death. It relies almost entirely on the same mechanism documented in Okpu's case: patient "declined" treatment, staff documented it, no further action taken.

Three men. One facility. Twenty-four months.

"The administration doesn't have a clue. They do not have an actual, real rationale, endgame, or plan for the aftermath of this."

- Senior official, speaking anonymously about DHS oversight capacity, as quoted by The Intercept

The Oversight Vacuum: How DHS Lost the Ability to Punish Its Contractors

To understand why GEO Group faces zero meaningful accountability, you need to understand what happened to DHS oversight during the first year of Donald Trump's second term.

In 2025, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem imposed a sweeping new contracting policy. All DHS contracts above $100,000 - and the agency spends billions annually - would require personal review and sign-off by the Secretary herself. Before a contract reached Noem's desk, it had to pass through a chain of political appointees, each signing a routing checklist. The last name on that checklist before Noem's was typically Corey Lewandowski.

Lewandowski is not a Senate-confirmed official. He does not draw a government salary. He is classified as a "special government employee" - a status historically used for brief, expert consulting roles, limited to 130 days per year. Elon Musk held the same designation at the start of the Trump administration. The designation carries reduced ethics requirements compared to full-time officials and permits outside income from private employers.

Lewandowski has refused to disclose whether he receives outside income from private companies, and if so, from whom. He has declined to answer questions from Congress about the scope of his authority at DHS. For months, members of Congress asked Noem to detail what Lewandowski actually does. Her answer, at a March 2026 Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, was unambiguous: Lewandowski has "no role in approving contracts."

That answer was false. Internal DHS records reviewed by ProPublica show Lewandowski personally approved a multimillion-dollar equipment contract last summer. Current and former DHS employees told ProPublica he has approved numerous contracts, and that his signature on the routing sheet is typically required before any major spend reaches Noem. Noem's denial to Congress, if knowing and willful, constitutes a federal crime under 18 U.S.C. Section 1001 - the same statute that applies to lying to federal investigators. Noem was subsequently fired by President Trump in March 2026, though the White House did not publicly state whether the contracting disclosures played a role.

The result of this arrangement was a DHS contracting process nominally controlled by the Secretary but practically filtered through an unconfirmed, unaccountable political operative with undisclosed outside income. Whether Lewandowski's undisclosed principals have any financial interest in GEO Group or other private prison operators is unknown. He has not been required to answer.

The Political Economy of Private Detention

Private prison operators GEO Group and CoreCivic spent decades cultivating political relationships that insulate them from accountability when detainees die. (Photo: Unsplash)

The private prison industry's political protection operation is not subtle, but it is effective.

GEO Group and its primary competitor CoreCivic together spent more than $25 million lobbying Congress between 2010 and 2024, according to federal lobbying disclosure records. Both companies donate strategically to politicians on committees that oversee DHS, ICE, and federal contracting. Both contributed to Trump's 2024 inauguration. Both have seen their federal contracts balloon under the current administration.

The financial incentives for ignoring compliance failures are structural. GEO Group is paid per detained immigrant per day. More beds, more detainees, more revenue. The company has no financial incentive to reduce detention populations and no credible fear that compliance failures will cost it contracts. The historical record supports that conclusion: across multiple administrations, documented deaths and standards violations at private ICE facilities have resulted in temporary official concern followed by renewed and often expanded contracts.

What changed under the Trump administration's second term is scale. ICE was directed to dramatically increase detention capacity from around 41,000 beds under Biden to a target north of 100,000 under Trump's executive orders. The private prison industry, which had been constrained under Democratic governance, found itself essentially handed a blank check. GEO's stock doubled. CoreCivic's stock doubled. The companies accelerated expansion plans that had sat dormant for years.

Against that backdrop, the death of a single Cameroonian man in a Pennsylvania solitary cell - a man who had been detained, who had a name and three children, and who was supposed to be checked on every fifteen minutes - becomes a rounding error in a profit-and-loss calculation. ICE's official characterization of the safety failures as "for informational purposes only" was not negligence. It was a policy choice, made by an agency that depends on private operators to meet court-mandated and executive-directed bed capacity targets.

You cannot simultaneously order a hundred thousand detention beds and hold accountable the companies that fail to keep people alive in those beds. The Trump administration chose the beds.

A Pattern of Federal Indifference, Documented in Federal Records

The GEO Group case at Moshannon is not a story of insufficient evidence. The evidence is voluminous, government-produced, and in the public record. ICE's own investigators found it. ICE's own inspectors documented the same failures returning months later. Federal prosecutors in Texas identified the same conduct - fabricating safety check logs before a custody death - as serious enough to indict GEO employees.

What is absent is not evidence. What is absent is consequence.

The ICE death review of Frankline Okpu's death was completed in early 2024. It sat, apparently unremarked upon within the agency, until The Intercept obtained it through Freedom of Information Act litigation in February 2026 - more than two years after Okpu died. The document had been available through litigation for weeks before it became public. ICE did not voluntarily disclose it. GEO Group did not make it public. When The Intercept sent detailed questions to both agencies in advance of publication, ICE said it could not respond by deadline because of "the blizzard in the Northeast." GEO Group did not respond at all.

The March 2024 ODO inspection that found the same systemic failures was a follow-up compliance check - standard procedure after a detainee death. It found GEO had not fixed the problems. It documented six additional failures to perform required suicide watch checks across just thirteen reviewed files. ICE's response to this second, post-death inspection finding the same pre-death failures? No documented disciplinary action against GEO. No contract termination. No reduction in payments.

"GEO staff did not witness Okpu's refusal, visit Okpu to explain the risks associated with refusing the appointment, nor attempt to obtain Okpu's signature on the form."

- ICE Death Review of Frankline Okpu, Moshannon Valley ICE Processing Center, 2024

Federal prosecutors have shown they are willing to indict GEO employees for falsifying safety logs - the Big Spring, Texas indictment demonstrates that. But those prosecutions are driven by local U.S. Attorneys with prosecutorial discretion. Under the current Department of Justice, which has seen its Civil Rights Division hollowed out and its prosecution priorities redirected toward political opponents rather than corporate malfeasance, the prospect of a federal prosecution of GEO Group employees for Frankline Okpu's death is not on any public radar.

The family of Frankline Okpu - three children in Cameroon without their father - has no obvious legal avenue for federal redress. Immigration detainees' access to civil litigation is restricted. The government entities responsible for oversight have decided the failures are "for informational purposes only." The political actors who allocate federal contracts have financial and ideological incentives to keep GEO Group in business at maximum scale.

What Accountability Would Actually Look Like

There are specific actions that would impose meaningful consequences for what happened at Moshannon Valley. They are not radical. They are the normal apparatus of a government that takes compliance and human life seriously.

First: the DOJ's Civil Rights Division could open a pattern-or-practice investigation into GEO Group's Moshannon facility under the Civil Rights of Institutionalized Persons Act. This is the exact statutory mechanism Congress created to address systematic rights violations in detention facilities. It has been used before against both public and private facilities. It is not being used here.

Second: ICE could exercise the contract termination provisions that exist in every federal detention contract. Those provisions allow termination for persistent standards violations, repeated safety failures, or documented misconduct. ICE has not invoked them at Moshannon or at Folkston after documented deaths and sustained compliance failures.

Third: the U.S. Attorney for the Middle District of Pennsylvania - in whose jurisdiction Moshannon sits - could open a grand jury investigation into the falsification of federal detention records, specifically the 23 fabricated safety checks documented in ICE's own review. Federal prosecutors in Texas found the same conduct at a GEO facility worth indicting. The same conduct in Pennsylvania should be worth examining.

Fourth: Congress could compel testimony from GEO Group executives about the systematic falsification of records at their facilities, the pattern of deaths, and the company's internal response. The Senate Judiciary Committee has jurisdiction. It has not acted.

None of these things are happening. Corey Lewandowski has not been required to disclose who is paying him. Kristi Noem was fired without the contract falsification scandal becoming the public explanation for her departure. GEO Group's stock is up. Moshannon Valley is still operating, under the same management, with the same contractual framework that failed Frankline Okpu.

The Three Children in Cameroon

In the documentation around Frankline Okpu's death, one detail recurs: he was a father. He had three children. ICE's death review describes him as "a 37-year-old Cameroonian father of three." He came to the United States, was detained by ICE, was placed in solitary confinement after an altercation with a guard, and died because the people paid to check on him every fifteen minutes chose to write down checks they never performed.

The check-the-box accountability that followed - four violations noted, none deemed contributory, $4 million rewarded - reflects something specific about how the American immigration detention system values the lives of the people inside it. These are not citizens. Many have no legal representation. Their deaths generate federal paperwork rather than federal action. The companies that profit from their detention have enough political cover to ensure that paperwork is the end of the story.

Chaofeng Ge was 32. He was found with his hands and feet bound. Sheikh Fouad Abdulkadir was 46, an imam, a man his community called beloved. He reported chest pain and an abnormal heart rhythm and was, according to GEO's records, given the option to decline further monitoring. He died.

Three men, two years, one facility, one private company, no criminal prosecutions, no contract terminations, expanding federal business.

This is not a system that failed. It is a system that worked exactly as its current architects intended. The question is whether there are enough people outside the system - journalists, lawyers, legislators, voters - who find that intolerable. The federal records exist. The evidence is documented. What is missing is political will.

Frankline Okpu's children are growing up without their father. GEO Group's shareholders received their dividends on schedule.

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