GEO Group’s Delaney Hall in Newark, New Jersey, runs on immigrant labor. Detainees cook, clean, and repair the facility for as little as $1 a day and sometimes for nothing at all.
So when 300 migrants imprisoned in Delaney Hall went on a hunger and labor strike last Friday over conditions they likened to physical and mental torture, they were taking aim at GEO Group’s bottom line. Executives at the for-profit public corporation can keep their overhead low and their profits high by hiring as few employees as possible and shifting essential jobs to people who have no choice but to do them for free.
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“Our labor isn’t valued. We don’t get a letter of recommendation for being a good worker, for the hard labor we provide here to better our living conditions,” a Delaney Hall prisoner said on condition of anonymity via a statement from Eyes on ICE New Jersey. “We were the ones who shoveled the snow during the winter, we are the ones serving the food, we are the ones who clean the units, we are the ones who clean the bathrooms. We are not recognized or valued for our labor.”
Protesters began to gather outside Delaney Hall last weekend, after 300 prisoners published an open letter, saying they are “tortured physically and psychologically” by the camp’s living conditions, as the Prospect reported. They said they wanted officials to close the detention camp and “free every person in there,” according to Gabriela Soto, an American citizen whose husband, Martin Soto, had been inside Delaney Hall for almost half a year.
The protests grew over the long weekend, and multiple elected officials showed up to demand access to detainees. On Monday, New Jersey’s Democratic Gov. Mikie Sherrill told the crowd she asked to go inside and was refused. After she left, federal agents attacked protesters with batons, pepper balls, and pepper spray; they stationed an armored BearCat nearby, and the agent inside repeatedly pointed a mounted gun. They hit Sen. Andy Kim (D-NJ) with tear gas as he tried to negotiate a deal between agents and protesters.
Conditions in ICE prisons have led to at least 56 deaths, as well as the exploitation of labor to turn detainees into profit centers.
Protests continued Tuesday and immigrants issued another letter, describing worsening conditions and saying that GEO Group “fails to meet the basic conditions necessary to protect our health and our lives.” According to the letter, GEO Group staff are serving decaying food that contains worms and failing to repair bathrooms, “which are in terrible and inhumane condition.” Staff ignores serious health issues, including that “most people have a persistent flu with phlegm that won’t go away; many have conjunctivitis, urinary tract infections, fever, and coughs,” and nurses fail to treat detainees right away or at all. ICE coerces detainees into signing deportation orders, judges’ rulings are “highly questionable,” and most bond requests are denied without a legal basis. And then there is the forced-labor issue, which has driven mounting anger.
“They’re getting paid next to nothing,” Sen. Kim told the Prospect in an interview. “I’m also hearing reports that some people are being forced to do this work without any compensation, either.”
GEO Group is allowed to pay immigrants so little because of the federal government’s Voluntary Work Program, as well as the exception in the 13th Amendment that abolished slavery “except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.” (ICE detainees have mostly not been convicted; the vast majority of those arrested through 2025 had no criminal records.)
About half of all of those kidnapped by ICE are working in the facilities, according to Georgetown Law. That allows GEO Group executives to avoid the overhead cost of hiring an outside workforce, which would cut into their revenue, which was $705.2 million for the first quarter, a 17 percent increase over last year.
With such ample revenues, GEO Group executives could pay fair wages. The main reason they don’t, Kim said, is that “then they’d have less profit.”
Protesters continued to hold vigil yesterday, and some noted the injustice of how ICE and GEO Group pretend that the work program is a privilege. Jenny Garcia, the detention campaign coordinator for the American Friends Service Committee and a member of the Eyes on ICE New Jersey coalition, said that sometimes GEO Group will “pay” a worker with a soda. The company does not give workers the proper tools to do the jobs, she added—cleaning crews get a spray bottle of water—so they buy their own supplies from the commissary.
Immigrant advocates who spoke to the Prospect also said the program is not voluntary. Like at prisons across much of the country, guards retaliate against those who refuse to participate, including through solitary confinement, denial of medical treatment, and threats that they will be moved to another facility in a different state, away from their families.
THE DELANEY HALL STRIKE IS JUST ONE of numerous collective labor actions undertaken in recent months in protest of not only the inhumane and torturous living conditions in ICE prisons, which have led to 56 deaths in custody and counting, but also the exploitation of labor in order to turn detainees into profit centers.
Earlier this month, 140 immigrant prisoners from Torrance County, New Mexico, and the Northwest ICE Processing Center in Tacoma, Washington, announced the formation of La Union de Secuestrados por ICE, or the Union of People Kidnapped by ICE, outlining exactly how their suffering is part of a business model. They said they “firmly denounce that the current operations against immigrants are not driven by security concerns … but rather by a system that has turned human suffering into a business.”
Shortly afterward, detainees at the Desert View Annex in Adelanto, California, went on hunger strike to protest their conditions, including an economic boycott. The food portions are so small at the facility that they must buy expensive commissary items from Keefe Commissary Network, a subsidiary of private equity–backed Keefe Group that provides overpriced goods to prisons and jails across the country.
Collective action of any kind encourages others to do the same; as the saying goes, courage is contagious. That is why ICE is brutally retaliating against strikers inside Delaney Hall and attacking protesters outside, immigration advocates told the Prospect. It’s why ICE moved Martin Soto, who organized the Delaney Hall strike, to a different detention camp early Monday morning in Elizabeth, New Jersey.
ICE did the same thing to Rogelio Bolufé, who organized fellow strikers at the Torrance County Detention Facility in New Mexico. Bolufé went on hunger strike for ten days after he alleged that staff from CoreCivic, the other major for-profit prison corporation, which runs the Torrance County facility, allegedly stole his legal documents and draft complaints against the corporation. Then they spent the next 48 hours moving him around the country, first to Camp East Montana, at Fort Bliss in Texas; then Alabama; then Arizona; and finally to Washington state.
“There’s a lot of strategy behind this,” said Garcia. “They know that [strikes] are inspiring people and that scares them.” Garcia added that the Delaney Hall detainees “are really holding firm on the labor strike.”
Separating organizers is the most common tactic ICE uses to prevent collective action, said Josefina Mora-Cheung, director of organizing at La Resistencia, which works to support all immigrants and to shut down Washington state’s GEO Group facilities. That’s what happened when ten members of the newly formed Union of People Kidnapped by ICE went on hunger strike on May 26. By midday, most of the organizers had been transferred out of the unit or deported, including organizer Bolufé, whose location is now unknown. Guards also retaliate by limiting how much access they have to the outside world by limiting their phone calls, tablet use, and the ability to talk to third parties. They taunt and harass their targets, telling them that no one cares about or supports their cause, a tactic that GEO Group is using more frequently, advocates said.
“We think this is indicative of the fear that GEO and ICE have of people coming together and what pressure they could create if they denounce the conditions they’re facing,” Mora-Cheung told the Prospect.
A spokesperson for GEO Group referred questions to ICE, who did not respond to a request for comment.
