Ex-ICE Official Paid to Defend $1-a-Day Wages for Immigrants

ICE lawyers rebuked Tracey Valerio for testifying as an expert witness in a lawsuit when they say she was ‘not authorized to speak on behalf of the agency.’

Nick Schwellenbach
12.17.18 5:03 AM ET

In April 2018, Tracey Valerio, the top official in charge of “all agency contracting” at Immigration and Customs Enforcement, resigned. Within months, she was recruited as a paid expert witness in a lawsuit to defend ICE’s biggest contractor—a large, private prison and immigrant detention company known as the GEO Group.

The lawsuit charged Florida-based GEO with violating minimum wage laws by paying the same immigrants now being locked up in record numbers by the Trump administration as little as $1 a day for menial work such as cleaning toilets. That case and others like it threaten GEO’s profits. But paying immigrants too little is hardly the only issue. Valerio, the top ICE contracting official who became GEO’s paid witness, not only went spinning through her agency’s revolving door, she was accused of violating the law and an agency rule in the process.

Moreover, Valerio turns out to be just one of a bevy of top officials to work for GEO and other private prison companies after throwing in the towel at ICE and the federal Bureau of Prisons, where government executives seem to form close relationships with the private companies they oversee on taxpayers’ behalf, only to accept lucrative employment with these same contractors later on.

The previously unreported allegations against Valerio were made during a court hearing earlier this year, according to court records, and in an official letter complaining about her role from a senior ICE lawyer that was reviewed by the Project On Government Oversight, a non-profit watchdog group. ICE has objected to the information she provided in the case.

“As Ms. Valerio was not authorized to speak on behalf of the agency or provide the information contained in the declaration submitted, ICE objects to the submission of the declaration to the extent that it purports to be provided on behalf of the agency or express agency views,” ICE attorney Anne M. Rose wrote in the letter to the court on August 1.

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