After months of speculation sparked by documents released pursuant to a FOIA request in January, the federal government has officially awarded a $529 million contract to open a new ICE detention facility in Hudson, Colorado, northeast of Denver. The contract was awarded to the private prison company the GEO Group last Wednesday, and authorizes the company to operate the Hudson facility as a migrant detention center through 2031. The GEO Group, which has faced serious allegations of human rights violations and trafficking, also operates the agency’s migrant detention facility in Aurora.
News of the contract was first broken by Project Salt Box on Friday.
The 1,200-bed facility in Hudson operated as a prison until it was closed in 2014. Now known as the Big Horn Contract Detention Facility, the Hudson site is just one of several “turn-key detention facilities” which the Immigration & Customs Enforcement arm of the Department of Homeland Security is currently working to enter contracts with. Others include facilities located outside of Miami and Seattle, as well as in central Pennsylvania. The rush to sign contracts with ready-to-operate facilities is part of an ongoing ICE sprint to bring 5,500 new detention beds online in the next 30 days.
The contract with the GEO Group, which lasts through 2031, specifies that the facility can only be used for ICE detainees. The contract has a “ceiling,” or maximum, of $528,678,643 over that time period. Rather than being paid upfront, the GEO Group will be paid on a rolling basis commensurate with the extent to which the facility is used.
Locals have been protesting the possibility of turning the facility into an ICE detention center for months, since long before the deal inked last Wednesday became official. Previously, the government granted GEO a six-month, $39 million contract to operate the facility, but the site remained shuttered for the duration of that contract.
The GEO Group, which operates private prison facilities across the country, including at least 19 ICE detention centers, currently holds roughly one-third of all ICE detainees nationwide. In 2025, GEO reported more than $250 million in profit, a 700% increase from the previous year. David Venturella, the current acting director of ICE, worked at the GEO Group from 2012 to 2023, and was paid by the company as a consultant until 2025.
Despite being one of the federal government’s go-to corrections contractors, the GEO Group also has a long track record of abuses. The company has faced repeated lawsuits for slave labor, dangerous neglect, and abuse. The company operates the Delaney Hall facility in New Jersey, which has recently seen hunger strikes by detainees protesting abusive conditions.
In a statement to the Colorado Times Recorder, the Colorado Immigrant Partnership Teams – or IPT Colorado – expressed disappointment at the news of the contract.
“These immigrant detention centers, especially those run by private companies such as GEO Group are locations where immigrants are held in appalling conditions, with inadequate food and medical care,” IPT Colorado’s statement said. “GEO Group has consistently resisted basic standards of care for facilities they operate. We urge the Town of Hudson to do everything possible to resist this change in use for the abandoned Hudson Correctional Facility.”
While the agency has been working to expand capacity since Donald Trump returned to office, the pivot to turn-key facilities, rather than new builds or significant renovations of existing facilities, may be an attempt to circumvent increased levels of local oversight which have been seen in Colorado and a number of other states, by avoiding the need to file permits, petition local governments for land use exemptions, or otherwise give local governments and activists a heads-up.
Earlier this year, we covered ICE’s growing need for more detention facilities to keep up with the agency’s growing daily quotas, which has contributed to a pattern of internal agency rules violations like holding detainees indefinitely in a network of 170 “hold rooms” around the nation, including nine here in Colorado. According to ICE’s own rules, detainees are not allowed to be kept in the small, bedless hold rooms for more than 72 hours. Federal data shows that those rules were violated thousands of times last year, with at least one detainee held in a Colorado hold room for more than a month. A detainee was held in the Newark, New Jersey hold room for 292 days.
Though some of the local media cast doubt on our reporting at the time, it has since been confirmed by local governments, ICE statements, and additional reporting. Last week, the Gazette reported that shackled ICE detainees were seen being led out of the same building in downtown Colorado Springs that we identified from federal data in March.
Organizers are encouraging people to attend a town meeting in Hudson this Wednesday to discuss options with the town council for preventing the long-closed facility from reopening as an ICE detention center.
