A public relations firm that was set on trying to rehab a private prison company that’s paid by the federal government to jail immigrants is now facing a public relations crisis of its own after angry and disgusted employees forced an early termination of the company’s account.
“In June, after word reached Edelman employees that the company would be doing work for the GEO Group, a debate sprang up on Fishbowl, a networking app used for industry communications,” The New York Times reports. “Screen shots of the Fishbowl messages from Edelman employees were shared with The Times. ‘I am beyond disturbed,’ one employee wrote. Another wrote, ‘This is an inherently political, moral & values based issue.’”
Disturbed is right. In 2017, GEO Group had three detainee deaths at its Adelanto Detention Facility in California in the span of just three months, with even the company’s shareholders passing a resolution demanding GEO Group better report abuses within its facilities. Outside activists have even pressured giants such as JPMorgan Chase into severing financial ties with private prison profiteers like GEO Group.
A different but equally terrible company that also jails immigrants for the federal government is CoreCivic, which is currently facing a $40 million dollar lawsuit filed by a mom whose 19-month-old toddler died after weeks in custody in a detention facility it operates in Texas. Yazmin Juárez said staffers failed to get Mariee proper medical treatment, releasing them only after the baby had become “limp and hot.” She would die in a hospital six weeks after their release.
So why would Edelman have even considered rehabbing this type of company in the first place? Money. Good old-fashioned, swampy-wet money. GEO Group invested in Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and has inked lucrative federal contracts since, with the Times further reporting that one of the Edelman folks who pitched GEO Group was actually “Lindsay Walters, who joined the company in April after serving as a deputy press secretary in the White House.” Drain the swamp!
Other Edelman employees knew something was up when the company seemed keen on keeping GEO Group’s account hush-hush. “Some employees asked to not be assigned to the GEO Group project, according to two people familiar with the requests. Others voiced their misgivings to supervisors.” In the end, they won out, and “executives informed employees that the company was resigning the GEO Group project.” Good.