Company GEO Group wants immunity in forced labor case
The US Supreme Court has agreed to hear a case involving the GEO Group, a $3.8bn company contracted to provide detention facilities to the US government. The company faces allegations of forced labor at an immigration detention center in Aurora, Colorado.
Migrants threatened with solitary confinement
The lawsuit, first filed in 2014, accuses GEO of violating federal anti-trafficking laws. One of the violations includes threatening the detained migrants with solitary confinement if they refused to work. The migrants are detained under civil immigration rules. The plaintiffs say this constitutes forced labor under the Trafficking Victims Protection Act. A lower court allowed the case to proceed.
Rather than addressing the merits, the Supreme Court will consider whether the 10th Circuit was wrong to deny GEO’s claim of governmental immunity.
The LA Times reports,
GEO Group, on the other hand, argues that it should be granted the same legal protections as the government when performing governmental functions: “The alternative is a legal backdoor through which activists can undermine policies with which they disagree by targeting contractors with lawsuits they could never bring against the government.”
The lawsuit challenges a key feature of the US immigration detention system. One being the use of civil detention to subject non-criminal migrants — including asylum seekers — to exploitative labor under the legal exception carved out by the 13th Amendment.