An ICE Contractor Is Worth Billions. It’s Still Fighting to Pay Detainees as Little as $1 a Day to Work.

GEO Group, whose stock is valued at $4 billion, says that state minimum wage laws don’t apply to the cleaning services that it’s asked detained migrants to perform at facilities where they’re kept.

by McKenzie Funk

March 19, 2025, 7 a.m. EDT

The for-profit prison company GEO Group has surged in value under President Donald Trump. Investors are betting big on immigration detention. Its stock price doubled after Election Day.

But despite its soaring fortunes, the $4 billion company continues to resist having to pay detainees more than $1 a day for cleaning facilities where the government has forced them to live.

At the 1,575-bed detention center GEO runs for Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Tacoma, Washington, detainees once prepared meals, washed laundry and scrubbed toilets, doing jobs that would otherwise require 85 full-time employees, the company estimated. The state’s minimum wage at the time was $11 an hour. (It’s now $16.66.) In 2017, Washington sued GEO to enforce it, and in October 2021 a federal jury ruled unanimously in the state’s favor.

This year, GEO and Washington are back in court — for a third time — as the company tries to reverse the earlier decision that sided with the state. GEO has brought in contract cleaners at the Tacoma facility while the case plays out, keeping detainees there from paid work and from having a way to earn commissary money.

The legal battle has national repercussions as the number of ICE detainees around the country rises to its highest level in five years. The vast majority are held in private facilities run by GEO or corporate competitors like CoreCivic. If following state minimum wages becomes the norm, Trump’s immigration crackdown could cost the country even more than it otherwise would — unless private detention centers absorb the cost themselves or decide to cut back on cleaning, which Tacoma detainees have already accused GEO of doing.

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https://www.propublica.org/article/geo-group-ice-detainees-wage

Judge keeps block on Trump gang deportations, says they face 'torture, beatings' in El Salvador

An appeals court is set to weigh President Trump's use of the Alien Enemies Act.

ByPeter Charalambous, Katherine Faulders, and Alexander Mallin

March 24, 2025, 10:27 AM

The Venezuelan migrants removed by the Trump administration to El Salvador last week deserved to have a court hearing before their deportations to determine whether they belonged to the Tren de Aragua gang, a federal judge ruled Monday morning.

In a ruling denying the Trump Administration's request to dissolve his order blocking the deportations,U.S. District Judge James Boasberg wrote that Trump's "unprecedented use" of the Alien Enemies Act does not remove the government's responsibility to ensure the men removed could contest their designation as alleged gang members.

Trump last week invoked the Alien Enemies Act a wartime authority used to deport noncitizens with little-to-no due process by arguing that the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua is a "hybrid criminal state" that is invading the U.S. Boasberg temporarily blocked the president's use of the law to deport more than 200 alleged gang members with no due process,calling the removals "awfully frightening" and "incredibly troublesome."

An official with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement subsequently acknowledged in a sworn declaration that "many" of the noncitizens deported last week under the Alien Enemies Act did not have criminal records in the United States.

"The Court need not resolve the thorny question of whether the judiciary has the authority to assess this claim in the first place. That is because Plaintiffs are likely to succeed on another equally fundamental theory: before they may be deported, they are entitled to individualized hearings to determine whether the Act applies to them at all," Judge Boasberg wrote in his ruling Monday, adding the men were likely to win their case.

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https://abcnews.go.com/US/appeals-court-hear-arguments-deportation-alleged-venezuelan-gang/story