Judge Says Thousands of Detainees May Sue a Prison Company For Using Them As a "Captive Labor Force

Judge Says Thousands of Detainees May Sue a Prison Company For Using Them As a “Captive Labor Force”
Immigration detainees allege that the GEO Group is violating a federal anti-slavery law.
Madison Pauley


Early one morning, Abdiaziz Karim was sleeping in his new dorm in an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention center when an officer woke him up. The guard pointed out graffiti on the wall and a light fixture smeared with toothpaste and demanded that Karim, a Somali waiting for an asylum hearing, clean them. When Karim protested, the guard got angry.

“He said to me he would write me up, or I’m going to go to segregation or if I don’t clean this, it will affect my case,” Karim recalled during a deposition he gave last month as part of a lawsuit against the GEO Group, the private prison company that operates the detention center in Adelanto, California. So he cleaned the wall. “Because I realize that if I don’t do those things, it will affect my case; I was not going to get bond; I was not going to get released.”

Since 2014, a series of lawsuits filed in federal courts from Washington to Georgia have collected similar allegations of coercive labor practices inside for-profit immigration detention centers run by GEO and its main competitor, CoreCivic. The lawsuits claim that the companies that operate the detention centers are violating minimum wage, unjust enrichment, and anti-slavery laws by coercing detainees to work for free, or, in some cases, $1 per day, by threatening them with punishment and depriving them of basic necessities. These cases have the potential to undercut GEO and CoreCivic’s profits from ICE detention, which accounts for about a quarter of their revenues, according to SEC filings. Northwestern University political science professor Jacqueline Stevens estimates that in 2012, savings from detainee labor accounted for approximately a quarter of each company’s net profits.

Karim, who spent two years in Adelanto before losing his asylum case and being deported to Somalia in August, is one of a group of former detainees who have brought a class-action lawsuit against the GEO Group for allegedly profiting off “a readily available, captive labor force.” Last Tuesday, a federal judge in California allowed the lawsuit to proceed as a national class action, with Karim and his three co-plaintiffs representing the tens of thousands of detainees who have been locked up in GEO facilities since 2007. Andrew Free, a Tennessee-based attorney representing the detainees, none of whom are still in detention, welcomed the ruling as a breakthrough. “For the first time, everybody who’s locked up in a GEO immigration prison, and who’s subject to the allegedly illegal policies, now has someone that they can look to as a voice, to bring their own treatment to light,” he says.

more...

https://www.motherjones.com/crime-justice/2019/12/immigration-detainee-geo-forced-labor-lawsuit/