GEO Group’s “Dark Money” Donation to a Group Tied to a Top Lawmaker

ICE’s largest detention contractor, GEO Group, made a quarter-million-dollar “dark money” donation last year to a group aligned with Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH), who chairs a key congressional committee overseeing ICE. GEO made the contribution shortly after the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, a massive law that nearly triples ICE’s budget and funds the doubling of immigrant detention space, which experts say is likely to boost GEO’s revenues.

The company is most known for running the largest number of privately operated ICE detention centers and for operating private prisons. One of its subsidiaries also holds the ICE contract for monitoring immigrants who are not detained who are awaiting immigration court hearings, and that subsidiary won a “skip tracing” contract in December worth up to $121 million to locate immigrants for ICE to arrest.

A Jordan-aligned super PAC, American Liberty Foundation, revealed the donation erroneously in a Federal Election Commission filing, according to a GEO Group spokesperson, and wrongly attributed the donation to GEO Group’s political action committee. Instead, the contribution actually came from a GEO Group account, according to the company spokesperson.

GEO Group’s spokesperson said in an email to POGO Investigates that “the $250,000 contribution in question was not made by GEO’s Political Action Committee and was made to American Liberty Action Fund, a C4 entity.” The American Liberty Action Fund has the same leadership as the similarly named super PAC.

American Liberty Action Fund’s website states that “Under IRS rules, contributions to ALAF are not publicly disclosed, and there are no limits on contributions from individuals or corporations.”

Donations made to entities registered under this part of the Internal Revenue Code, 501(c)(4), are normally kept from the public, which is why donations to these groups are known as “dark money.” This $250,000 contribution appears to be the first publicly known instance of a dark money donation by GEO Group.

The strange circumstances around the $250,000 donation prompted concern from a campaign finance watchdog.

“When a super PAC fails to accurately report where it’s getting its money, that not only violates the law and deprives voters of crucial information they need to make informed electoral decisions, it could also be concealing other illicit activity,” said Saurav Ghosh, the non-profit Campaign Legal Center’s director for federal campaign finance reform. One potential concern Ghosh highlighted is the potential that the super PAC has been “taking money from federal contractors, which are categorically barred from making political contributions.”

“Transparency about the sources of money spent on elections is essential to our democracy,” said Ghosh, a former Federal Election Commission enforcement attorney, in an emailed statement.

GEO Group’s Donations

American Liberty Action Fund and the American Liberty Foundation share the same president, secretary, and treasurer, according to their most recent publicly available annual reports to the Internal Revenue Service. The president of both groups, Ray Yonkura, was Jordan’s former chief of staff for nearly a decade, spanning the start of Jordan’s tenure in Congress in January 2007 and serving until November 2017, except for a period in 2012 when he worked on a political campaign. The treasurer for both groups, Thomas Datwyler, has worked for multiple political committees and has racked up tens of thousands of dollars in Federal Election Commission fines, such as for failing to report contributions.

Neither Yonkura nor Datwyler responded to multiple requests for comment.

The spokesperson for the private prison giant identified the source of the $250,000 donation as “The GEO Group Inc. Political Contribution Account,” a fund controlled by the company. He declined to address whether GEO Group has made other dark money contributions, or any other questions.

“Dark money is a problem no matter where it comes from, but is especially troubling coming from federal contractors,” wrote experts from New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice in 2015. “It is implausible to think that the politicians who benefit from such spending do not feel gratitude towards their benefactors — and when the benefactor is a federal contractor, opportunities to tip the scale in its favor in return are legion.”

While this quarter-million-dollar, dark money donation opens a new window into GEO’s influence efforts, those that were previously disclosed are sizeable.

The ICE detention contractor’s political activity and lobbying report for 2025 states the company’s subsidiaries and its PAC gave $4,425,400 in political contributions that year. The company has disclosed giving to political campaigns as well as other political groups that aim to influence elections. One of those is MAGA, Inc, the super PAC aligned with President Donald Trump. In recent months alone, a GEO subsidiary called GEO Reentry Services LLC gave several $1 million contributions to MAGA, Inc: one in October 2025, one in March 2026, and one again in April 2026.

There are limits on how much each U.S. citizen can give to political campaign committees, and corporations cannot donate to them directly (although they can donate through their own PACs). However, corporations can give unlimited amounts directly to super PACs.

Federal contractors are barred from giving to super PACs, but GEO has argued some of its subsidiaries are allowed to donate because they don’t hold federal contracts. The Federal Election Commission deadlocked 3 to 3 on this issue in such a case involving GEO, and ultimately closed it in 2021 without finding any violation.

Both political campaign committees and super PACs must disclose their fundraising and expenditures regularly to the Federal Election Commission.

However, according to GEO’s spokesperson, GEO Group’s donation to the American Liberty Action Fund is to a 501(c)(4) group. Groups organized under this portion of the tax code are not supposed to engage in political advocacy as their primary activities, but rather can advocate on issues and lobby for legislation. The American Liberty Action Fund’s website states it educates the public “on how unchecked bureaucracy threatens your freedoms,” among other values and actions it takes, but it contains little beyond a homepage, which has a sign-up for text and email alerts and offers ways to donate.

There are no limitations on how much donors can give to these groups — and the groups can keep their donors secret. Companies like GEO Group also do not have to disclose these donations. (Some companies’ shareholders have forced them to voluntarily disclose; that’s not the case at GEO.)

Congressional Oversight, Rep. Jordan, and the GEO Group

GEO’s $250,000 donation came on July 15, 2025, according to a filing by the American Liberty Foundation — 11 days after the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, a bill GEO lobbied on in the months before it became law. That law is expected to boost the company’s bottom line through a massive expansion in ICE’s budget of tens of billions of dollars.

Jordan was a vocal booster of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act’s passage. In a social media post, he wrote “It delivers Big, Beautiful Deportations” and “It boosts Border Patrol and ICE agents on the frontlines.” These parts of the law intersect with the jurisdiction of the congressional panel that Jordan chairs: the House Judiciary Committee. Its website says, “Particularly important in our time is the Committee’s oversight responsibility for the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security.”

GEO’s $250,000 donation last year to a group with ties to Jordan dwarfs any previously disclosed spending by GEO Group on political organizations connected to the lawmaker. Jordan’s campaign received $12,500 in contributions from GEO Group’s PAC from 2022 through 2024. There is no record of donations from the PAC to Jordan’s campaigns in other years, and there is no other record of American Liberty Foundation or another Jordan-affiliated PAC receiving funds from the GEO Group or its PAC.

Under Jordan’s leadership, the House Judiciary Committee’s current majority has avoided public scrutiny of top administration officials who’ve formerly worked at or on behalf of the GEO Group, even when their current government work could influence the company’s revenue and profits.

Since February 2025, for example, former GEO Group executive David Venturella has held a senior advisor position within DHS. He was reportedly hired by White House Border Czar Tom Homan, who formerly worked as a GEO consultant. Earlier this month, the Trump administration tapped Venturella to run ICE.

Venturella and Homan’s influence and ties to GEO prompted concerns last August from three Democratic lawmakers on the House Judiciary Committee.

“In light of these grave concerns and your past work for GEO Group, you may have an actual conflict of interest—and certainly the appearance of one—if you are participating in or influencing agency decisions or actions that could affect the spending of hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars with your former client,” the Democratic lawmakers wrote to Homan.

Neither Jordan nor any members on the committee’s majority signed the letter.

A spokesperson for Jordan did not respond to a request for comment.