A federal death review found that staff at a GEO Group-run immigrant prison in Pennsylvania serially falsified safety records for Frankline Okpu, a Cameroonian man who died in solitary confinement in 2023. Despite documenting 94 missed or falsified visual checks and other violations of medical standards, ICE declined to penalize GEO Group and instead awarded the company an additional $4 million in funding.
The review detailed that GEO staff failed to conduct required 15-minute checks on Okpu, with surveillance footage showing many logged checks never occurred or were performed improperly. ICE investigators also found GEO violated standards by falsifying a medical refusal form and failing to conduct a documented face-to-face medical encounter before Okpu was found unresponsive.
The main topics covered are the death of an immigrant detainee, systemic falsification of safety and medical records by prison staff, and the lack of accountability or consequences for the private prison operator despite these findings.
Staff at a for-profit Pennsylvania immigrant prison serially falsified detention records about a man who died in 2023, according to a federal death review obtained exclusively by The Intercept earlier this month.
Despite these findings, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement declined to punish the facility’s politically connected operator, GEO Group. Instead, records show the agency gave GEO even more money to run the facility after the man died: $4 million in additional funds, just three months after the death review was completed. After an April 2024 visit at the facility, ICE’s acting director called GEO a “valued partner.”
Serial Falsification of Safety Checks
Frankline Okpu died in solitary confinement at GEO Group’s Moshannon Valley ICE Processing Center in Clearfield County on December 6, 2023. According to the detainee death report, two days before his death, staff sent the 37-year-old Cameroonian father of three to solitary confinement following an altercation with a guard in which he allegedly swallowed an unknown substance they believed to contain “k2,” a synthetic form of cannabis, “mixed with a tranquilizer.”
A physician who treated Okpu upon his placement in segregation instructed facility staff to take him to the emergency department. According to GEO, Okpu refused informed consent for this course of treatment; the doctor ordered GEO to house him in the facility’s infirmary for observation. GEO staff claim Okpu refused this course of treatment, too. The provider ordered prison staff to conduct 15-minute visual checks to ensure his safety.
But records show that did not always happen before Okpu died, according to ICE’s death review.
Surveillance footage revealed 94 of 219 required visual inspections (42 percent) did not occur as ordered. In 23 instances, GEO staff recorded checks that never occurred at all. In another 33, staff logged visual inspections without looking in the cell window to personally observe Okpu. And in 38 logged events, the checks staff claimed to perform every 15 minutes occurred outside that required timeframe.
Federal prosecutors have previously indicted GEO staff for falsifying visual inspection logs during the period preceding an incarcerated person’s death in custody.
The Intercept sought comment and posed a series of detailed questions to ICE and GEO. An ICE spokesperson said the agency was unable to provide a response by deadline, citing “the blizzard in the Northeast.” GEO Group did not respond.
Other Falsified Records Violated Standards
ICE’s reviewers found discrepancies between the chain of events on the morning Okpu died and GEO’s documentation. According to the death report, Okpu was due to have a routine dental appointment, but when a resident adviser went to bring him in shortly after 7 a.m., Okpu did not respond. The resident adviser reported to a dental assistant that Okpu had refused his appointment, and the dental assistant completed and signed a refusal form, however, she “acknowledged she did not witness Okpu’s refusal, visit Okpu to explain the risks associated with refusing the appointment, nor attempt to obtain Okpu’s signature on the form.” ICE concluded GEO “failed to comply” with the medical care standard requiring providers to obtain a signed refusal form after counseling patients.
The dental assistant also told ICE “it is common practice to have another staff member sign as a witness on refusal forms when patients refuse appointments, then deliver the completed form later.”
The death review also found facility medical staff violated ICE standards by failing to conduct a face-to-face encounter with Okpu less than an hour before he was found unresponsive, despite documenting that they had done so. Video revealed that when three nurses conducted their rounds shortly after 10:30 a.m., they “knocked on Okpu’s cell and then all three briefly looked in the window of Okpu’s cell, then walked away without conducting a face-to-face encounter.”
And although GEO staff documented that Okpu ate both breakfast and lunch on the day he died, ICE investigators found prison staff did not confirm he ate the breakfast staff slid inside his door, and he was found unresponsive as lunch was being distributed. By 11:15 a.m., a nurse arrived at Okpu’s cell and found him lying on his side, with a “clear frothy liquid coming from his mouth.” Nurses administered Narcan and CPR and summoned EMS. Okpu was declared dead at 12:02 p.m.
In all, ICE investigators found GEO staff failed to comply with four of the agency’s detention standards, committed two additional facility policy violations, and noted one area of concern. “These deficiencies,” the report notes ICE notes, “are for informational purposes only and should not be construed as contributory to the detainee’s death.”
A Larger Pattern
ICE’s findings that GEO failed to follow informed consent protocols in Okpu’s case mirrors a pattern observed in March 2024 by ICE’s Office of Detention Oversight, or ODO. In its compliance review of operations at Moshannon, ICE inspectors found medical staff violated ICE standards by failing to explain the need for treatment to detained immigrants, allowing non-medical resident advisers to carry out refusals and sign as witnesses — thus preventing detained people from asking follow-up medical questions, and failing to ensure medical staff obtained signed refusal forms. ODO deemed these failures “a priority component.”
The ODO inspection report also found GEO staff failed at least six times to perform required 15-minute safety checks in one of 13 files reviewed involving detained immigrants on suicide watch, suggesting the serial failures to conduct safety checks in Okpu’s case were not an isolated occurrence.
Since Okpu’s death in 2023, at least two more men have died in custody at Moshannon. Chinese national Chaofeng Ge, 32, died by hanging himself in a shower room at the facility on August 5, 2025. His hands and feet were bound behind his back, according to Ge’s autopsy and first reported by Scripps News.
Then, on December 14, 2025, 46-year-old Sheikh Fouad Saeed Abdulkadir, a beloved imam in Ohio who was originally from Eritrea, died at Moshannon from unspecified causes. A one-page Detainee Death Report ICE released last week claims he “declined recommended admission to the medical housing unit for monitoring,” following an abnormal EKG reading “in early December,” after he’d reported chest pain, numbness, and tingling. The detainee death report does not explain why Abdulkadir was not rushed to the Emergency Department following the abnormal EKG.
The fact pattern is similar to what happened after the death of 57-year-old Jaspal Singh, who died of a heart attack on April 16, 2024, at GEO’s Folkston ICE Processing Center in south Georgia. An ICE Health Service Corps mortality review found that GEO’s care in Singh’s case “deviated beyond safe limits and directly contributed to his death,” according to records obtained by The Intercept through Freedom of Information Act litigation. But, as it did with Moshannon following Okpu’s death, ICE subsequently awarded GEO millions more in federal funding — a $50 million expansion deal of Folkston was finalized in 2025, when ICE received an influx of money from Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill — after Singh died under circumstances where ICE reviewers found violations.
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