The 10-year contract for the private company operating the Northwest ICE Processing Center in Tacoma, Wash., is set to end this month, but secrecy shrouds whether it’s been extended.

Immigration advocates and legal experts have heavily criticized the lack of transparency over the expected renewal of the contract between Immigration and Customs Enforcement and GEO Group, which owns and manages the 1,575-bed, jail-like facility.

Neither GEO Group nor ICE officials have released information about a new contract for running the detention center. The current contract, inked in 2015 as a one-year contract with an option to renew each year for nine years, is set to expire Sept. 27. The contract awarded GEO Group a minimum of $700 million over 10 years.

"It not only puts a veil over people's eyes, but also prevents people inside the detention center from knowing what the future of this detention center is going to be," said Josefina Mora-Cheung, director of organizing at La Resistencia, a local activist group advocating for the end of mass deportations and the closure of detention centers.

GEO Group and ICE officials did not answer emailed questions about whether a new contract was signed or whether the existing contract has been extended. Officials did not respond to reporters' requests to provide copies of the new contract, should it exist.

"We cannot confirm pre-decisional contract selections, but we can confirm that ICE is exploring all options to meet its current requirements," said ICE spokesperson Chrissy Cuttita in an email Tuesday.

GEO Group spokesperson Christopher Ferreira referred questions about the contract to ICE.

"We are proud of the role our company has played for 40 years to support the law enforcement mission of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)," he said in a statement.

Numerous health and human rights violations have been documented at the facility over the years: Severe medical neglect, unsanitary food, swamplike water, the deployment of “chemical agents” against detainees, sexual abuse and assaults, and excessive uses of force and solitary confinement.

Though many of these health and safety issues are prohibited under the current contract, GEO Group has never been sanctioned by the federal government for breaching those terms, researchers with the University of Washington’s Center for Human Rights found in a July report.

Nevertheless, a contract is an important tool for advocates to track violations and hold the facility accountable, said Kiku Hughes, an organizer at Tsuru for Solidarity, a social justice and immigrant rights organization that has also called for the facility to be shut down.

"ICE isn’t going to care about (violations) but maybe local politicians can put more pressure on GEO," Hughes said.

U.S. Reps. Pramila Jayapal, D-Seattle, and Emily Randall, D-Bremerton, have attempted to provide greater oversight at the detention center, with limited success. Jayapal on Friday called for a Government Accountability Office investigation into ICE's detention center contracts with private corporations. State health officials have been repeatedly blocked from investigating the Tacoma facility, though they are poised to start inspections after a recent federal appeals court ruling.

While scrutiny over GEO Group’s management of the Tacoma detention center has intensified in recent months with the return of President Donald Trump to office, immigration advocates note many of the documented violations also occurred under the Obama and Biden administrations.

Still, the resources fueling Trump's crackdown on immigration are unprecedented. Trump has vowed to double the number of beds for detained immigrants nationwide to at least 100,000, allocating $45 billion for immigrant detention over the next four years.

Trump’s immigration agenda could mean huge profits for private prison companies like GEO Group, the largest detention services operator for ICE. GEO Group has 21 detention facilities under contract across the country.

Between April and June, the number of beds used under existing ICE contracts across the country increased from about 15,000 to 20,000, “the highest level of ICE utilization in our company’s history,” GEO Group Chairman George Zoley said in an August earnings call.

In its most financial reports, GEO Group noted a 94% contract retention rate among its owned and leased properties over the last four and a half years.

ICE published a request for information to "identify possible detention facilities to house noncitizens" in Western states, including Washington, in August 2024. GEO Group submitted a response the following month, proposing "the continued use" of the GEO Group-owned facility in Tacoma.

"As the owner and operator of the Facility, GEO will continue to provide up to 1,575 beds to ICE under any subsequent contract," the response stated, according to documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union.

But ICE never published a formal solicitation for the new contract, immigration advocates said.

In April, ICE published a "strategic sourcing vehicle" requesting proposals to help "bring an additional allotment of detention beds online" in response to Trump's declaration of an emergency at the U.S.-Mexico border and related executive orders. It's unclear whether this call for contractors covers the Tacoma facility.

As the current contract expires, the limited information thus far is a “missed opportunity” to assess GEO’s performance and address existing concerns, said Alejandra Gonza, executive director and founder of Global Rights Advocacy, a Seattle-based nonprofit that provides pro bono representation in human rights cases.

She, like other immigration advocates across the Seattle region, is not aware of any effort to do so publicly or with people who have raised concerns.

“We haven’t had a dialogue,” said Gonza, who also teaches human rights advocacy at UW.

The secrecy around the new contract may be connected to the enforcement of House Bill 1232, a state law signed earlier this year that imposes new health and safety standards at private detention facilities, including provisions to reduce the spread of infectious diseases and to ensure access to nutritious meals.

The state law supersedes a 2023 law that aimed to provide greater oversight at the facility, but which has been bogged down in litigation after GEO Group sued state officials over the law.

While the new state law does not apply to existing contracts signed before January 2023, it would be in effect for any new contract, said Tim Warden-Hertz, directing attorney at the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project.

The state can’t stop the Trump administration from continuing its mass detention and deportation campaign, but “it can enforce basic standards," he said.

Mike Fault, a spokesperson in the Washington state Attorney General's Office, said in an email the agency would enforce House Bill 1232.

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Staff reporter Nina Shapiro contributed to this report.

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