ICE calls it a “voluntary work program” but inside of ICE detention, there’s nothing voluntary about it. At best, detainees are paid a single dollar a day. At worst, they’re forced to clean and labor without pay, punished with solitary confinement if they refuse.
Court filings from Georgia to Washington confirm it: threats, coercion, and deprivation are how private prison corporations keep their facilities running.
Is this a work program, or is this modern day slavery?
This fight has reached the Supreme Court. Both lawsuits tear open GEO Group (the largest private prison operator in America) and expose how it runs on forced labor.
One case will decide if ICE can keep coercing labor with solitary confinement. This will set a nationwide precedent on what they’re allowed to do everywhere.
Another will decide if immigrants in Tacoma deserve more than a dollar for a full day’s work. Before we turn to those battles, we need to see the conditions that created them.
If You Don’t Clean, You Go to the Hole
At these privately owned prisons immigrants are ordered to scrub toilets, mop floors, wash showers, and cook food. Sometimes they are told they will be paid a dollar a day. Many receive nothing at all, so yes, even that single dollar is not promised.
Stripping people of their humanity is wrong. Full stop. Immigration detainees are not exceptions. Most have no criminal records at all. They weren’t arrested for a crime but for a civil infraction. Crossing without permission is a civil violation, in the same category as forgetting to wear a seatbelt or rolling through a stop sign.
They are in civil detention. Not criminal. These are typically asylum seekers, people in the middle of visa or green card disputes, and immigrants fighting deportation without a criminal record to their name.
One former detainee put it in the simplest terms: “If you do not clean, you go to the hole (solitary confinement).”
Solitary confinement is a form of psychological torture. Stripped of human contact, people spiral into anxiety, paranoia, hallucinations, and despair. These are effects that can affect them for the rest of their lives, long after they leave.
Something even more heartbreaking to know? The children are not spared.
We actually first saw this during the first Trump administration, when Inspector General reports showed that children were placed in solitary confinement for resisting, talking back, or other minor infractions.
Many said they never knew what they had done wrong and described being left cold, scared, and without a blanket.
Consistent Payments Aren’t Guaranteed
“Detainees receive pay owed before before being transferred or released”
How ambiguous. That clause protects ICE legally, but can leave people working without a cent with commissary balance that only appears when someone is transferred or released. So, as detention stretches increase from months to years, people are trapped with no exit.
They’re even forced into debt at the commissary just to buy deodorant, or food without grasshoppers in it. Yes, they can incur debt at ICE facilities.
We need to acknowledge the fact they’ve explicitly included this clause isn’t without cause. It is exploitation written into policy. These prison giants have every reason to stall, knowing detainees have no power to fight back.
Modern Day Slavery in America
Refusing to work is not an option. Hunger strikes are not an option. Talking back is also not an option.
Those who disobey face ‘discipline’ including but not limited to:
solitary confinement
sudden disappearance of their hygiene items and food
being crammed into filthy, overcrowded cells nicknamed the chicken coop.”
ICE actually frames the program as a benefit. They hand out one dollar in wages, then serve one dollar meals so rotten detainees are left picking insects out of their food.
This is how they maximize their profits. It’s a business at the end of the day.
Behind concrete walls and steel bars, many have no choice. People work 40 hours a week for eight dollars, just to buy the opportunity to hear their loved one’s voice. At 15 cents a minute, no work means no contact with their families.
Sadly, the courts have already ruled these slave wages are okay. If you’re wondering why it’s because both the government & these corporations profit. Funded by your tax dollars. In the case of Ndambi v. CoreCivic, Inc they ruled that since detention work is not real employment, detainees are not entitled to the workplace protections in the Fair Labor Standards Act.
No OSHA safety standards. No minimum wage. Just exploitation.
The private prison industry profits off homegrowns, too. All thanks to this 13th Amendment clause that codified slavery.
You are reading that right. Prisoners in the U.S. can be forced to work for what amounts to pocket change. They make pennies an hour, sometimes less than a dollar a day. This doesn’t apply here because immigration isn’t considered criminal, it’s civil. Forcing detainees into labor anyway is not just exploitation, it’s abuse layered on fraud.
SCOTUS to Decide If Slavery Is Legal
Is slavery constitutional? Well, yes, actually. The 13th Amendment, ratified in 1865, abolished slavery and involuntary servitude except as punishment for a crime. Criminal actions.
You read that correctly. Prisoners in the United States can be (and often are) forced to work for pocket change. Pennies an hour, sometimes less than a dollar a day. GEO Group has their finger in that pie, too, profiting from locking up U.S.-born prisoners.
But the 13th Amendment clause that allows forced prison labor does not apply in immigration detention, because immigration is civil, not criminal. Forcing detainees into labor anyway is not just exploitation.
There is no sugarcoating any of this. It’s abuse on top of fraud, and now the Supreme Court gets to decide if GEO Group can keep doing it.
The first case was filed eleven years ago: Menocal v. The GEO Group, Inc.
Eleven years of appeals. Eleven years of GEO doing exactly what the lawsuit challenges — forcing immigrants to work under the threat of solitary confinement. The Supreme Court now has the final word whether to bless it as policy or call it what it is, human trafficking with government approval.
This case is filed under the Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA), a federal law. That means the Court’s ruling will not just apply to Colorado or to GEO alone. It will set the nationwide rule
Oral arguments for this case are scheduled for November 10, 2025, but he final decision won’t come until Spring.
The second case is Nwauzor v. GEO Group, filed in 2021 out of Tacoma, Washington. It challenged GEO’s $1-a-day ‘work’ program. After losing at trial and being ordered to pay $23 million in back pay to detainees, GEO appealed to escape the verdict.
They also eliminated the program in the mean time, so they don’t have to pay living wages and reduce their profits just a smidge.
Years of appeals later, not a dime has been paid. GEO would rather weaponize the courts, even the Supreme Court, than pay what it owes. When the first ruling came down, GEO scrapped the program, let the facility rot in filth for weeks, then grudgingly hired a crew to clean. It felt like punishment. The program never returned. They’ve announced they’re appealing to SCOTUS just days ago but the official filing has not come yet. I will continue following this, and keep an eye out for it.
It’s Not the Money. It’s the Precedent.
This is not about money. GEO admitted back in 2021 it could pay the $23 million judgment twenty times over from Tacoma’s profits alone. Under Trump’s new contracts, they expect $2.56 billion this year, with $263 million in fresh revenue from expanded detention. This number continues to grow with the abhorrent amount of money afforded to immigration and detention in the big ugly bill.
Mass incarceration pays too well to risk. The truth is if one court calls solitary confinement torture and dollar-a-day labor slavery, the entire model starts to crack. GEO would rather burn millions on lawyers than let that truth slip. While not as strong as a SCOTUS ruling, it still creates the idea. They can’t have that in the back of your mind.
Also, the facility in the second lawsuit? The one about the facility in Tacoma, Washington? Yeah, that “facility” is a cesspool. The Northwest ICE Processing Center in Tacoma is the fourth-largest immigration detention center in the U.S. It can hold up to 1,575 people while they go through immigration hearings.
But since 2023 more than 1,500 health complaints have been filed. GEO even tried to block health inspectors from finding them by claiming ‘federal immunity’ to state health laws. The state actually had to sue to get access.
And on August 19, 2025, the Ninth Circuit ruled that Washington can enforce its own health and safety laws inside the facility. Inspectors now have the power to enter, fine, and demand changes.
They will likely appeal this, but they haven’t announced it or filed anything yet.
For GEO, this is a nightmare. Rotten food, slave wages, and medical neglect are not mistakes. They are the system. And for once the courts told them no. Tacoma is the fourth-largest detention center in the country, worth millions each year if ICE keeps it full.
In 2025 alone two people have already died there, while others launched hunger strikes to protest the filth, medical neglect, and dollar-a-day pay.
The truth is simple. GEO has no interest in fixing Tacoma or paying what it owes. Every stall, every appeal, every trip to the Supreme Court is about one thing: protecting the precedent, keeping the profits flowing, and shielding a business model built on exploitation.
Lets Wrap It Up
Call it what it is. This is slavery in the United States, wrapped in legal language and sold as a program.
Immigrants who have committed no crime are forced to scrub, cook, and labor under the threat of solitary confinement, while corporations rake in billions on their backs. Two people died in Tacoma this year. Thousands more have been silenced, starved, and worked into debt. GEO Group does not fear paying twenty-three million dollars it can cover twenty times over. It fears precedent.
It fears one court naming torture for what it is and slavery for what it is, because the whole machine would start to crack. And so it drags these cases through endless appeals, up to the Supreme Court itself, not to defend law or order but to defend profit.
Behind the concrete and steel, the truth is simple: this system was never built to uphold justice. It was built to monetize human suffering, and GEO intends to keep it that way.
Let’s hold them accountable. Here’s what you can do:
Demand answers from your representatives. Ask them why your tax dollars are paying for slavery. Call, write, and refuse to let this slide into silence
Groups like Detention Watch Network, RAICES, Freedom for Immigrants, ACLU. and local bail bond funds in WA & CO can help directly support detainees, monitor abuses, and fight policy battles. Donations, volunteering, and amplifying their work builds the infrastructure of resistance.
♥ You can find all of these orgs with a quick search. I’m not able to include the links here because Substack places limits on how much data can fit into an article that also gets emailed. Thank you for understanding ♥
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I recall reading in history books ( sorry for the sarcasm) that there was a time ca1933-1945 when government and corporations used prisoners for slave labor. They got terrible rotten food, no medical, terrible punishments for noncompliance and horrific living conditions.
How, why, has this country slimed its way so low. If we read about this in some 3rd world dictatorship we’d be appalled. Nowadays it’s one abomination after another. Drumpt’s is reign is an embarrassment and humiliation of America.
All your articles hit hard and crack things open more. This one is particularly horrifying and heartbreaking even though I knew the outline of it.