Private prison companies served with lawsuits over using detainee labor

Class action lawsuit brought by detainees in New Mexico accuses CoreCivic and Geo Group of violating minimum wage laws

Amanda Holpuch in Oakland
Sun 25 Nov 2018 11.00 GMT

When a New Mexico immigration detention facility needed people to cook for inmates and clean its halls, it founda solution already inside its walls.

For $0.50 or less per hour, detainees such as Mbah Emmanuel Abi and Desmond Ndambi, who have since been granted political asylum, cooked meals for their fellow inmates and worked in the facility library.

Their experience is not unique: for $1 a day – and sometimes less – migrants prepare meals, clean facilities and do laundry at privately run immigration detention centers across the country.

The practice has been compared to slave labor and has brought a pile of lawsuits to the doorsteps of the country’s two biggest private prison companies, CoreCivic and Geo Group, which in 2017 had a combined $4bn in revenue.

In a recently filed class-action lawsuit, Abi, Ndambi and one other man who fled Cameroon in 2017, brought wage theft claims against CoreCivic’s Cibola county correctional center in New Mexico.

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