GEO Group Settles Cal/OSHA Complaint Regarding ICE Detention Center

from Jeanne KuangCalMatters

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Private immigration detention company GEO Group settled a landmark case over conditions at one of its Central Valley detention centers. She agreed to pay more than $100,000 over allegations that the company failed to ensure the safety of immigrant detainees when they worked at the facility.

The agreement, signed in May and announced Tuesday, is a victory for immigrant rights groups that have pushed California lawmakers to try to regulate conditions in the federal government’s private detention centers.

Eight such facilities now operate across the state, and the number of immigration detainees has increased during Trump’s second presidency.

During the pandemic, lawmakers passed a measure allowing state inspectors to enter the facilities. In 2022, after receiving complaints from lawyers and immigrant detainees at the Golden State Annex facility in McFarland, state workplace safety inspectors from Cal/OSHA opened a case at the center and cited GEO Group with workplace violations, alleging the company failed to prevent the spread of COVID-19 among detainees working there and to provide other safety measures.

This was the first known time the state treated detained immigrants as workers and the operators of their detention centers as employers subject to state labor laws.

Immigrants held in ICE custody are being held for civil violations, not jailed for crimes. But at the detention center, where they can participate in a “volunteer work program” by cleaning the facility, preparing meals or cutting other detainees’ hair, they are paid just $1 a day. Detainees often participate to afford food in the centers’ stores or to talk to their families.

As part of the settlement between GEO Group and Cal/OSHA, the company agreed to improve its disease control plans for detainees and stopped fighting a ruling by state regulators last year that found the company subject to state labor laws. The state will rescind its citations. Neither GEO Group nor the state agency responded to requests for comment.

Detention center operators and federal immigration officials have continued to collision with state and local regulators regarding conditions. Last month, a federal judge sided with San Diego County health officials and ordered the Department of Homeland Security and its contractor CoreCivic to allow a county inspector into the 1,400-bed Otay Mesa detention center near the Mexican border. This company last week sold the facility and another in Kern County to the federal government, CalMatters reported.

And amid several federal lawsuits challenging the practice of paying detainees as little as $1 a day for work, GEO Group succeeded last month in getting ICE to update its standards for detention contractors. the Washington Post reported. The new standards state that detainees “are not entitled to wages or benefits under applicable wage laws or labor regulations.”

This article was originally published on CalMatters and is republished under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives license.