IMHO: It IS slavery!
Excerpt
At privately run detention centers, immigrants say they're forced to work for $1 a day.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP VOWED IN MARCH, “My administration will focus on ending the absolutely horrific practice of human trafficking. And I am prepared to bring the full force and weight of our government, whatever we can do, in order to solve this horrific problem.”
Trump is using this specter of human trafficking to justify beefed-up border walls and a vicious crackdown on immigrants. Experts say his cure has nothing to do with the disease.
“It’s a fantasy, what the President is promising,” says Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera, an associate professor at George Mason University who studies trafficking in Mexico and Central America. “People will still come, escaping poverty and violence. Trafficking happens when they are forced to work along the route—drug smuggling, sex work. By increasing border enforcement, you’re just making the journey more expensive and longer, and making people more vulnerable to traffickers.”
But some people caught in this sweep say that the federal crackdown itself subjects them to another, pernicious form of trafficking. They say the corporations that operate immigrant detention facilities illegally force detainees to work. There’s reason to believe thousands of the roughly 35,000 people in immigrant detention are currently being coerced into labor.
Under federal law, human trafficking is defined as subjection to involuntary labor through “force, fraud or coercion.” Within the past year, four lawsuits have been filed by seven people who say they were victims of trafficking at the hands of the nation’s two largest private detention center operators: CoreCivic and GEO Group. The suits charge that at five CoreCivic facilities and one GEO Group facility, the corporations violated the federal Trafficking Victims Protection Act by threatening solitary confinement or withholding basic necessities, such as food, toilet paper and soap, if detainees refused to work. According to the lawsuits, the companies did so to reduce labor costs and maximize profits.
The four new suits join one already wending its way through the court system. Filed in 2014 against GEO Group, the suit was certified as a class action this February. Approximately 62,000 people currently or previously detained in a GEO Group facility in Colorado might have been affected.
Each of these five lawsuits concerns the Voluntary Work Program, a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) program that puts detainees to work for $1 a day.
“The name ‘Voluntary Work Program’ is misleading since, in most cases, it actually means forced labor,” says Liz Martinez, director of advocacy and strategic communications at Freedom for Immigrants, a nonprofit working to abolish immigrant detention. Noting that detained people are wholly dependent upon detention staff for basics such as food, toilet paper and even time outside, “the detention facilities create an inhospitable atmosphere that incentivizes people to join these Voluntary Work Programs,” she explains.
Asked about the size of the Voluntary Work Program, ICE spokesperson Danielle Bennett wrote, “Voluntary Work Programs currently exist at the five government-owned Service Processing Centers (SPCs) and at over 25 privately run facilities.” Bennett would not clarify what “over 25” meant. A 2014 New York Times investigation by Ian Urbina found that 55 U.S. detention centers had Voluntary Work Programs, 34 of which were run by private corporations.
Though only privately run detention centers have been named in the lawsuits, advocates don’t rule out the existence of forced labor in government-run facilities. “In county jails and other public facilities, they’re also put to work,” says Martinez. Not all of that labor falls under the Voluntary Work Program. Urbina found that Butler County Jail in Ohio, for instance, is not a formal participant, but approximately 50 of the 300 immigrants detained under the jail’s contract with ICE clean and perform maintenance. A county representative told Urbina that utilizing unpaid immigrant labor means the jail does not need to hire outside janitorial workers, saving the county hundreds of thousands of dollars each year.
However, lawsuits have targeted privately run detention centers because of the number of reported violations, as well as the outrage surrounding the fact that corporations and shareholders are profiting from this labor.
WORKING FOR $1 A DAY AND SANITARY NAPKINS
Martha Gonzalez was already a trafficking survivor. Fleeing an abusive relationship in Mexico, she hired coyotes to bring her and her daughter across the border, and was forced into sex work after the coyotes threatened them with violence.
In October 2017, after 14 months in ICE custody, Gonzalez was released and issued a T-1 visa, reserved for trafficking victims. Now, she is demanding restitution from CoreCivic. In February, she sued the company for labor trafficking.
Gonzalez spent those 14 months being shuttled through three of CoreCivic's Texas detention centers, in La Salle County, Hutto and Laredo. At both Hutto and Laredo, she says, prison officials verbally abused detainees, threatened them with solitary confinement and deprived them of basic necessities in order to coerce them into working seven days a week. For instance, Gonzalez tells In These Times, if she tried to take a day off, detention center staff refused her toothpaste and other essentials. When she was menstruating, they limited her sanitary napkins to two per day unless she worked.
5,532:
DAILY POPULATION IN U.S. IMMIGRANT DETENTION CENTERS IN 1994
39,322:
DAILY POPULATION IN U.S. IMMIGRANT DETENTION CENTERS IN 2017
Though the suit doesn’t specify how many others were allegedly threatened into working, Gonzalez says she wasn’t the only one who suffered retaliation for refusing to work. She also alleges that the paltry wages sometimes went unpaid, thus depriving her of the means to stay in touch with her family. In 2016, she filed a formal complaint about not being paid for some of the days she had worked. In retaliation, she says, staff didn’t allow her to work at all. Without that $1 a day, Gonzalez could not afford phone cards to call her daughter and mother. Calls from CoreCivic’s Texas detention centers typically cost 50 cents per minute.
Gonzalez and her attorney are seeking class-action status on behalf of every detainee who worked for no pay or $1 or $2 per day at any CoreCivic detention facility from February 2007 onward. It’s not yet known how many people could become part of this lawsuit if the court agrees, but her complaint estimates the number to be in the thousands or tens of thousands. Gonzalez wants the court to force CoreCivic to stop the practice. She and her attorney are also seeking minimum wage payments for labor performed while detained.
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