Until two days ago, immigrants in a Washington state ICE detention facility were forced to work for $1 by the private contractor who runs the prison-like facility.
These immigrants haven’t been charged or convicted of crimes, but they’re confined while the government determines their immigration status, i.e. whether they’ll be deported or allowed to stay. And while there, they’re effectively slave labor for the private company.
GEO Group, the contractor, replaced normally-paid workers with “volunteers” to cook, clean, paint, and perform other labor. The company coerced them by making them purchase daily essentials like soap and toilet paper, feeding them little and promising more food if they worked, and threatening them with solitary confinement, if they didn’t work.
Washington’s attorney general sued the company. On Wednesday, October 27, 2021, a federal jury agreed GEO Group has to pay the workers the state’s minimum wage, a decision that will cost the company millions. State law exempts state prisons and local jails from the minimum wage law, but not privately run for-profit prison companies.
Similar conditions exist in ICE detention facilities in other states.
GEO Group is a publicly-trade corporation, one of several that has exploited a Republican push that began in the 1980s to privatize incarceration. (This was supposed to save taxpayers money but instead enriched investors while subjecting inmates and detainees to abusive conditions such as inadequate food and medical care.)
Its stock began plunging in 2017, right after Trump took office, and has continued to sink under Biden, who ordered the Department of Justice to stop doing business with private prison companies. But ICE is part of the Department of Homeland Security.
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