SUMMARY: You might have seen the recent headlines about what’s happening to migrant children who cross the U.S. border without legal documents. Amna Nawaz explains what we really know about minors who have been separated from their parents, or who arrive at the border alone.
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.
SUMMARY: While police departments across the country address reform, community groups in cities like Chicago and New York are also teaching people about alternatives to 9-1-1 for crises that can be exacerbated by police presence. NewsHour Weekend’s Ivette Feliciano talked to author Alex Vitale of “End of Policing,” about the country’s reliance on law enforcement to solve complicated social issues.
SUMMARY: Two dozen cities that shelter undocumented immigrants have been sent letters by the Justice Department, threatening to subpoena them over proof that they are complying with immigration rules. The news angered some mayors meeting in Washington for a conference. John Yang talks to Republican Mayor John Giles of Mesa, Arizona, and Democratic Mayor Kathy Sheehan of Albany, New York.
SUMMARY: Since President Trump took office, immigration arrests are up 42 percent, and arrests of undocumented immigrants who don't have criminal records are up 145 percent compared to last year. The NewsHour's P.J. Tobia takes us along as ICE officers use the greater flexibility granted them under the Trump administration to crack down on immigrant communities, and how that's affecting families.
ICE officials have invited tech companies, including Microsoft, to develop algorithms that will track visa holders’ social media activity.
The Department of Immigration & Customs Enforcement is taking new steps in its plans for monitoring the social media accounts of applicants and holders of U.S. visas. At a tech industry conference last Thursday in Arlington, Virginia, ICE officials explained to software providers what they are seeking, algorithms that would assess potential threats posed by visa holders in the United States and conduct ongoing social media surveillance of those deemed high risk.
The comments provide the first clear blueprint for ICE’s proposed augmentation of its visa-vetting program. The initial announcement of the plans this summer, viewed as part of President Donald Trump’s calls for the “extreme vetting” of visitors from Muslim countries, stoked a public outcry from immigrants and civil liberties advocates. They argued that such a plan would discriminate against Muslim visitors and potentially place a huge number of individuals under watch.
ICE officials subsequently changed the program’s name to “Visa Lifecycle Vetting.” But, according to the ICE presentation, the goal of the initiative — enhanced monitoring of visa holders using social media — remains the same.
Speaking to a room of information-technology contractors, hosted by the Government Technology & Services Coalition, Louis Rodi, Deputy Assistant Director of ICE Homeland Security Investigations’ National Security Program, said the agency needs a tool equipped with “risk-based matrices” to predict dangers posed by visa holders, with the social media of those considered a threat under continuous surveillance throughout their stay in the U.S.
“We have millions and millions and millions of people coming every year, and subsequently departing, so we have to be smart about it,” said Rodi to a room of representatives from companies like Microsoft, Accenture, Deloitte and Motorola Solutions. “And I’m sure there are tools out there that can help.”
For this targeted group of visa holders, ICE’s online monitoring of public social media posts would be large-scale and non-stop. “Everything we’re dealing with is in bulk, so we need batch-vetting capabilities for any of the processes that we have,” said Rodi. Alysa Erichs, ICE Homeland Security Investigations’ acting Deputy Association Director for Information Management, told attendees that ICE hopes to get automated notifications about any visa holders’ social media activity that could “ping us as a potential alert.”
ICE spokeswoman Carissa Cutrell stressed to ProPublica that the Department of Homeland Security has not actually begun building any such program. “The request for information on this initiative was simply that — an opportunity to gather information from industry professionals and other government agencies on current technological capabilities to determine the best way forward,” Cutrell wrote in an email. The program would require clearance from numerous DHS units, including the Privacy Office and the Principal Legal Advisor, before it could be implemented, according to a federal official who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
In his speech, Rodi referred to meetings ICE has had with companies but did not mention any frontrunners. The major tech companies present at the conference, including Microsoft, Accenture and Deloitte, either declined to comment or didn’t respond to ProPublica's request to comment about their level of interest in providing technology for the vetting program. Microsoft has opposed Trump’s immigration policies, and several Microsoft researchers have publicly called for ICE to stop spying on visitors’ social media.
ICE is already monitoring some social media at eight Homeland Security Investigation posts internationally, Rodi said, and the plan is to expand to more sites. In response to a question posed by ProPublica from the audience, he stated that the department was open to other social media monitoring techniques, such as link analysis (which helps authorities map out applicants’ online connections), so long as they solely rely on public posts.
The ICE officials emphasized the Trump administration’s strict stance. “This administration is big on immigration enforcement, so we’re not going to look the other way like we have in the past when we have overstays,” said Rodi. “Maybe it’s an administrative violation — it’s still a crime. These people need to pay. They can’t get away with it.”
Some analysts argue that gathering social media data is necessary. ICE already has a tool that searches for connections to terrorists, according to Claude Arnold, a former ICE Homeland Security Investigations special agent, now with the security firm Frontier Solutions. But, he said, potential terrorist threats often come from countries, such as Iraq or Syria, that provide little intelligence to U.S. authorities. As a result, in Arnold’s view, social media information is all the more important.
Privacy advocates take a darker view. “ICE is building a dangerously broad tool that could be used to justify excluding, or deporting, almost anyone,” said Alvaro Bedoya, executive director of Georgetown Law’s Center on Privacy & Technology. “They are talking about this as a targeted tool, but the numbers tell a different story.”
Bedoya noted that the program outline originally anticipated that the monitoring would identify 10,000 high-risk visa holders a year. That suggests the pool of people under social media surveillance would be many orders of magnitude larger. (ICE officials did not address this point at the conference.)
Last week, a coalition of academics and technologists warned in a public letter that ICE’s interest in using big data algorithms to assess risk is misguided, given how rare it is for foreign visitors to be involved in terrorist attacks in the U.S. That means there’s little historical data to mine in hopes of using it to design a new algorithm. The letter cited a Cato Institute analysis that found that the likelihood of an American dying in a terrorist attack on U.S. soil in any given year was 1 in 3.6 million in the period between 1975 and 2015.
Cathy O’Neil, one of the signatories to that letter and author of “Weapons of Math Destruction,” told this reporter in August that any algorithm a company proposes would come built-in with some very human calculations. “At the end of the day, someone has to choose a ratio,” she said. “How many innocent false positives are you going to keep out of the country for each false negative?”
Thus far, social media monitoring of visa applicants has not identified any potential threats that wouldn’t have turned up in existing government databases, Rodi acknowledged. “We haven’t found anything that would preclude someone from getting a visa through social media alone,” he said. “But, you never know, the day may come when social media will actually find someone that wasn’t in the government systems we check.”
That argument doesn’t placate those who believe ICE’s vetting is already exhaustive. Social media surveillance would be difficult to carry out without collecting collateral data on thousands of American citizens in the process, said Rachel Levinson-Waldman, senior counsel to the Brennan Center’s Liberty and National Security Program.
“Generally, with surveillance technologies, they are adopted for national security purposes overseas, but are then brought stateside pretty quickly,” she said, citing practices first honed overseas, such as intercepting cellphone calls. “So once there’s some kind of dragnet surveillance tool or information collection tool in place for one purpose, slippage can happen, and it will expand and expand.”
A week before leaving office, Gov. Bill Ritter Jr. announced Tuesday that Colorado would participate in a federal background check program devised to catch illegal immigrants who have committed crimes.
The announcement comes after months of debate in Colorado over the program — known as Secure Communities — which allows local law enforcement officials to check the immigration history of those they arrest in a government database.
Officials with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the federal agency that runs Secure Communities in 35 other states, have said the program plugs holes in a system that allows illegal immigrants with criminal records to escape deportation.
