ICE detainees say they were forced into labor in Georgia, file lawsuit
A lawsuit filed against Georgia’s largest immigrant jail charges the private prison company that runs it broke federal anti-slavery laws by forcing detainees to work against their will.
The detainees were being held at Stewart Detention Center, one of the busiest immigrant prisons in the U.S., operated like many such facilities by Corecivic, a Nashville-based corrections company.
Immigrants say threats of punishment — and a need to earn money to buy food to supplement the center’s diet — pressured them to take prison jobs that pay between $1 and $4 per day. Earlier this summer, the plaintiffs’ legal team asked for class certification, meaning upwards of 40,000 migrants currently or formerly under the custody of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) could be covered by the suit, first filed in 2018.
“Prison corporations that have for years enriched themselves by exploiting detained immigrant labor and profiting off of human pain must be held accountable,” said Azadeh Shahshahani, a lawyer in the suit and legal director of Project South, an Atlanta-based organization that advocates for detained immigrants.
Wilhen Hill Barrientos, a Guatemalan asylum seeker, was detained at Stewart intermittently from July 2015 to June 2018. In a declaration submitted to the court, he said he was not asked whether he wanted to work upon arriving at Stewart but was instead told that failure to do so would result in solitary confinement.
He said he worked in the kitchen, regularly putting in 8- to 9-hour shifts, seven days a week — a workload in excess of ICE guidelines under its Voluntary Work
Program. Other detained immigrants at Stewart cut hair, did laundry and performed maintenance tasks.
In a statement, Corecivic said that “All work programs at our ICE detention facilities are completely voluntary and operated in full compliance with ICE standards…. Detainees are subject to no disciplinary action whatsoever if they choose not to participate in the work program. We set and deliver the same high standard of care — including three daily meals, access to health care and other everyday living needs — regardless of whether a detainee participates in a voluntary work program.”
But plaintiffs say they were coerced to sign up to work at Stewart and threatened with punishment to keep working. The lawsuit claims that the treatment they received violated the federal Trafficking Victims Protection Act, which prohibits modernday slavery, as well as state rules against “unjust enrichment.”
Such alleged abuse of the work program occurred, plaintiffs’ lawyers say, because
Stewart administrators have an “utter dependence on detained workers” to operate their facility.