New investigation says group linked to Jim Jordan got $250K from private prison company
A campaign-finance watchdog group filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission last week after a nonprofit news organization published a report about a private prison company’s “dark money” contribution to a political committee aligned with Ohio Republican U.S. Rep. Jim Jordan.
The reporting was published Wednesday by POGO Investigates – a newsroom within Project On Government Oversight, a nonprofit organization that produces “evidence-based investigations into government waste, fraud, and abuse.”
According to the report, on July 15, 2025, GEO Group – the largest private prison company in the United States – made a $250,000 contribution to the American Liberty Foundation, a super PAC aligned with Jordan.
It was only through a fluke that the contribution came to light.
The contribution came 11 days after Jordan voted for President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
The legislation cut taxes for the wealthy and slashed healthcare and food assistance for the poor.
The law also gave U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement seven times its annual budget to fund Trump’s mass-deportation program.
That money doubled detention space for immigrant-detainees.
GEO Group, is a huge player in the private prison business, with 62,000 total beds at the 51 U.S. facilities it operates, according to its website. It was poised to get a huge windfall from the bill.
As chairman of the U.S. House Judiciary Committee, Jordan is in a powerful position to be a friend or foe of any big government contractor — particularly one that contracts with ICE. His committee shares jurisdiction over ICE’s parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security, and has great latitude to investigate or ignore activities that fall under its purview.
Jordan was a big booster of the bill.
“It delivers Big, Beautiful Deportations,” he posted on X just prior to its passage. “The bill permanently secures our borders by making the largest border security investment in history, funding at least one million annual removals of illegal immigrants and ramping up mass deportation operations to a level never before seen in American history.”
Jordan’s office didn’t respond to multiple phone calls from the Capital Journal seeking comment. GEO Group also didn’t respond to emails.
‘Unprecedented growth opportunities’
As Jordan promised “at least one million annual removals of illegal immigrants,” GEO Group stood to get a boost to its bottom line.
In an August 2025 earnings call — about a month after passage of the Trump bill — GEO Founder and Board Chairman George Zoley touted his company’s prospects.
“Given the intrinsic value of our assets and the unprecedented growth opportunities we anticipate will materialize over the balance of this year and next year, we believe that our current equity valuation offers an attractive opportunity for investors,” he said, according to a transcript.
Last year, NPR reported that nearly 90% of detainees were in facilities operated by private companies such as GEO.
In February, GEO Group reported to shareholders that it had increased its number of detainee beds by 6,000 in 2025. That brought the total number of ICE detainees the federal government can pay GEO to house to 26,000.
As of April this year, there were about 60,000 people being held in ICE custody, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University.
Critics — including the ACLU of Ohio — say profit motive gives private prisons an incentive to lock up more people and to cut funding for security, medical care, and other supports for the people they imprison.
Complaints of abuse
While expanding its capacity to hold ICE detainees, GEO Group has also faced accusations of mistreatment.
This past month, hundreds of people being held at a GEO Group facility in Newark, N.J., went on a hunger strike complaining of deplorable conditions. Guards cut phone lines as detainees communicated their problems to people on the outside, the New Jersey Monitor reported.
Complaints of injustice aren’t limited to the New Jersey facility or GEO Group.
During Trump’s second term, ICE has seen the highest number of detainee deaths in decades, detainees were denied due process in more than 10,000 instances, more than 170 detainees turned out to be U.S. citizens, and — despite Trump’s claims — the overwhelming majority of detainees have not been convicted of a violent crime.
The private detention facilities have also been accused of blocking oversight. Despite having a legal right to enter them to investigate reports of mistreatment, members of Congress have repeatedly been denied access, they say.
News that at least one of those companies made a dark-money contribution demonstrates a lack of transparency that is both toxic and self-reinforcing, said Catherine Turcer, executive director of the good government watchdog group Common Cause Ohio.
“This circumstance of dark money is really painful because a private prison contributed dark money to the chair of a committee that makes decisions about ICE,” she said.
She added, “The policymaking is really direct. It’s ongoing. It’s the use of taxpayer money to go after undocumented people. There have been significant violations of due process. And we know that the lack of transparency when it comes to those prisons is mirrored by the lack of transparency in the dark money.”
Dark money
It was only through happenstance that Nick Schwellenbach, the journalist behind thePOGO Investigates report, found GEO Group’s $250,000 contribution to the Jordan-aligned political committee.
“It popped up in a really weird way,” he said in a phone interview.
Schwellenbach received a somewhat mistaken tip that led him on a journey through the loophole-riddled world of campaign-finance law.
A summary:
Two committees with similar names and identical leadership are aligned with Jordan — the American Liberty Foundation and the American Liberty Action Fund.
Each has the same president, secretary, and treasurer. The president, Ray Yonkura, served as Jordan’s chief of staff from 2012 to 2017, Schwellenbach reported. Yonkura didn’t respond to a request for comment from the Capital Journal.
The Federal Election Commission explicitly connects the American Liberty Foundation to Jordan. It lists the group as “current joint fundraising participants” with Jim Jordan for Congress and Team Jordan.
As a “super PAC,” the American Liberty Foundation is required to disclose its donors. As a 501(c)(4) “dark money” group, the American Liberty Action Fund isn’t.
The super PAC mistakenly disclosed the contribution as being made to it from GEO’s political action committee. GEO PAC never reported the contribution as it would have been required to do — had it made it, Schwellenbach said.
“I suppose it put (GEO) in a little bit of a box,” he said.
The company clarified that the contribution was made not by GEO’s political action committee, but from a legally distinct “political contribution account” that is subject to different rules, he said. GEO also clarified that the donation was made to the Jordan-aligned dark-money group — not his super PAC, Schwellenbach said.
Beyond that concession, the company has been uncommunicative.
“They basically explained what the facts are about this one contribution, but they wouldn’t tell me anything else,” Schwellenbach said. “I asked them, ‘Have you made any other dark-money contributions?’ ‘Are there other groups that received funds?’ … They just wouldn’t engage with any other questions.”
The Campaign Legal Center, a nonprofit watchdog founded by Trevor Potter, a Republican former chairman of the Federal Election Commission, says that GEO acted improperly in making the contribution.
The same day Schwellenbach published his investigation, Campaign Legal Center filed a complaint with the FEC.
It alleges that the Jordan-aligned super PAC failed to properly report the contribution.
“Moreover, the complaint alleges that GEO Group, American Liberty Foundation, and an affiliated 501(c)(4) dark money group, American Liberty Action Fund, violated federal campaign finance laws that prohibit making or knowingly soliciting a federal contractor contribution,” the Campaign Legal Center said in a written statement.
A lot more important than a single $250,000 donation
Among watchdogs, the GEO Group’s contribution raises the question of how much corporate money may have gone to dark-money groups and from there into political coffers around the time lawmakers were voting on the massive One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
And how many other times have anonymous corporate dollars gushed just as government contracts worth billions were about to — or just had — become available? Is there a secret pay-to-play system that the press and almost everyone else is locked out of?
While nearly all dark money groups’ funding sources remain hidden, studies show that oceans of cash flow through them. The Brennan Center for Justice estimates that a record $1.9 billion in dark money was spent in 2024, a presidential election year.
The only way the public now knows about GEO’s $250,000 contribution to the Jordan-aligned dark-money group is that Schwellenbach stumbled across it.
Turcer of Common Cause Ohio said the and the private-prison dark money contribution show a dire need for more transparency.
“Dark money came into the light because (the Jordan-aligned super PAC) made a mistake and reported the information to the Federal Election Commission,” she said. “This mistake highlights how important it is to actually make this information public. There is no reason to hide this money unless (corporations) believe it is actually influencing (politicians’) decision-making.”
She explained that campaign-finance disclosure laws exist so the public can understand where elected officials are getting their money as they spend ours. Dark money stands that on its head, she said.
“The reason we care about transparency is so we can root out corruption; so that we can follow the money and make connections to policymaking,” she said. “There are real consequences when we can’t actually follow the money and connect the dots.”