ABUSE • SURVEILLANCE • GEO GROUP
She reported sexual harassment by an ICE contractor. The company did nothing, according to former employees.
Silvia Reyna Mendoza spent nearly four decades building a life and raising her children in the United States. As she was trying to establish residency, the case specialist that was supposed to help began sexually harassing her.
Navigating the Immigration System
Silvia Reyna Mendoza came to the U.S. from Mexico as a teenager, fleeing domestic violence. She settled in Corning, California, a small town where she spent the next four decades raising her eight children, all U.S. citizens.
She tried for years to do everything necessary to finally establish U.S. residency. For Reyna, that meant, among other things, driving the 114 miles every other month to Sacramento for ICE check-ins.
There she would meet with her case specialist from BI Incorporated, the GEO Group subsidiary that runs the Intensive Supervision Appearance Program (ISAP) monitoring immigrants in their homes and communities.
Reyna's pathway to citizenship, she believed, ran through those meetings. So when her case specialist would yell at her aggressively for not answering his messages right away, she felt trapped.
“He was getting very hostile with her,” her daughter Patrisia Reyna told the Sacramento Bee. “She was panicking every time she had an appointment. She told me she didn’t want to attend her meetings, but of course, if she didn’t attend, that would cause a warrant to occur.”​
Reyna Mendoza with three of her children in a family photo.
“It’s just one of the worst feelings,” he said. “Here I am on deployment, on active duty, and they are abusing my mom.”
“She's the center of our community. We're all Americans contributing to society. Do you care about us? Where do you draw the fine line?”
Her son, Francisco Govea, then on active duty in the U.S. Army, didn't know what was happening to Reyna until he returned home.
Then, in March 2023, Reyna's case specialist began sexually harassing her, requesting sexual favors and sending her explicit videos and text messages saying things like, “If you're good to me, I'll be good to you.”
– Francisco Govea, Reyna's son
The Cost of Speaking Out
In November 2024, Reyna gathered the courage to report the harassment she was suffering to BI Incorporated. But instead of helping her, she says the BI supervisor she spoke with took her phone into another room and deleted the text messages and videos her case specialist had sent. Fortunately, she had already saved copies elsewhere.
No one from BI Incorporated or its parent company, GEO Group, ever followed up with her about her complaint.
“It's really hard when you're trying to speak up to the authorities of what's going on and they dismiss it. Who do you ask for help at that point?”
– Francisco Govea
A few months later, Reyna was told she would have to begin wearing an ankle monitor instead of simply using a less-invasive app for digital check-ins with BI. Then, in September of 2025, ICE took Reyna into custody.
In October, she filed a lawsuit against BI, the employee who harassed her, and the supervisor who tried to cover up his behavior. Ten days later, she was deported to Mexico.
Because a judge had already ordered that she be allowed to remain in the country, she was able to return to the country in November, crossing the border and turning herself into ICE. Today, she continues fighting to stay in the country where she has spent her entire adult life.
“With all that's happening, we have to keep fighting,” her son told the Sacramento Bee. “To have her back in the country, we’re one step closer to having her home.”
Reyna Is Not Alone
After seeing news of Reyna's lawsuit, two former BI employees came forward to support her account, providing sworn statements to California's Civil Rights Department describing an environment in which some employees routinely abuse and sexually harass undocumented immigrants and other employees.
“Over time, the absolute power granted them over [undocumented immigrants] makes some of them start to feel superior over the people they are monitoring,” one of the former employees wrote.
The other declared that he was fired in retaliation for reporting the aggressive behaviors of Reyna's case specialist — a “predator preying on the people he was supposed to be helping” — to their superiors.
Both said that GEO Group, BI's parent company, failed to act on complaints about the man who allegedly harassed Reyna and at least one employee.
He was “allowed to continue working without having to answer for the consequences of his actions,” one of the former employees wrote, “And we were basically directed to ignore the complaint.”
Citizens Bank is a key financial partner to CoreCivic and GEO Group.
CITIZENS BANK'S ROLE
Citizens Bank is a key financial partner to ICE's top detention contractors, GEO Group and CoreCivic. In the past year alone, Citizens has acted as administrative agent on agreements that have helped increase GEO's credit line by over $200 million.
In 2019, eight major U.S. banks pledged to cut ties with CoreCivic and GEO Group. Citizens chose to stay the course.
While the for-profit prison companies Citizens is backing hurt our neighbors, the bank continues to tout its commitment to fostering strong communities.
Join us to tell them it's time that they live up to that commitment.
GEO GROUP'S ROLE IN
ICE SURVEILLANCE
GEO Group's reach in the immigration system extends well beyond detention. Through its subsidiary BI Incorporated — a company originally in the business of tracking cattle —the company is monitoring around 180,000 people in their homes and communities in ICE's Intensive Supervision Appearance Program. With body-worn trackers and an app, they are collecting GPS data that, according to federal contracting documents, feeds into agency platforms "such as ELITE," the Palantir-built tool ICE reportedly uses to identify neighborhoods to raid.
In the fall, BI began piloting a "skip tracing" program with ICE, according to an update shared in GEO's Q4 2025 earnings call. In December, BI was awarded a $121 million contract to continue providing the services — using surveillance tools and direct observation to hunt down immigrants on ICE's non-detained docket. Legal experts and members of Congress have described the incentive-based program as essentially a bounty hunting effort. GEO Group now stands to profit at every stage: finding immigrants, monitoring them, imprisoning them, and transporting them.
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