Editor’s Note: This story was originally published here in the Tribuno del Pueblo, bilingual sister publication of the People’s Tribune.
Under the second term of President Donald Trump, for-profit prisons for immigration detention have surpassed billions of dollars in stock. With a majority of detained individuals awaiting deportation or with pending asylum cases being held in private facilities owned by corporations like the GEO Group or CoreCivic. Corporations whose motive is profit; leaving detainees with low quality food, little to no access to monetary funds, and overall poor working and living conditions.
For less than a dollar, these corporations feed their detainees. A kitchen worker at the Tacoma immigration detention center in Washington, testified that the grade of food is of extremely poor quality as he often had to pick out insects from it before serving. Another detainee in Golden State Annex, a detention facility in California, shared that he was sent to the detention center following his release from a state prison. He described the food and living conditions to be better in prison than in the for-profit facility.
The GEO Group, worth $4 billion, has been sued on multiple occasions for violating detainee’s working and living conditions. In 2017, the state of Washington sued the Northwest Detention Center for paying detainees with snack food rather than the minimum dollar compensation. While also sending them into solitary confinement if they rejected the food for payment. Another state lawsuit in 2021 ordered detention centers to pay the state minimum wage, with a pay back of $23 million in backwages or less than 1% of the corporation’s 2024 revenue.
Leading organizations like the Shut Down GEO Campaign in Colorado to analyze over 30 complaints and conduct interviews to better understand detainee’s experiences. Finding the main topics to be medical concerns, living conditions, guard behavior, and food insecurity. A detainee described that food was withheld or taken as a form of punishment by the guards. Others shared that their lunch was “⅓ cup of beans, ¼ cup canned corn, 1 to 2 pieces of lettuce, a half a piece of bread, and a baby’s spoon sized serving of something unidentifiable”. A meal of approximately 198 calories, less than half of the recommended 500 calories per meal for adults.
Currently, immigration detention centers provide detainees opportunities to work on a “voluntary” basis. For many detainees, the program is not voluntary as they need the money and have no other choice. According to information on the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) website, working conditions must meet federal, state, and local work safety protections to ensure an opportunity that can reduce the negative impacts of detainment. It is stated to be a “privilege” that is earned based on the detainee’s classification and can be revoked at any time. Like a job outside of detainment, the maximum full time hours are 8 hours a day or 40 hours a week. However, unlike the hourly federal minimum wage of $7.25 and state wages such as in California of $19.60, detainees are paid $1 a day. For a dollar a day, they can be assigned to labor-intensive work such as cleaning restrooms, being an aide for special needs detainees, preparing meals, and more.
Individuals work to be able to buy food and other essentials from the prison commissary as the portion size and a caloric intake of meals are extremely small. Yet that is still not enough as the commissary has raised the price multiple times the market rate. Ramen noodles are $3.02, one box of instant rice is $13.60, and one canned chicken breast is $17.49. With the payment of $1 a day, to buy the can of chicken, detainees must work 18 days for 8 hours. Making a meal, such as having chicken with rice, something you have to work on for over a month.
Raising the question: Is it truly voluntary work if you might starve without it?
