As immigrant prisoners inside Newark’s Delaney Hall enter their third week of collective action against increasingly inhumane conditions, attorneys for the private prison company that runs it are attempting a new gambit to evade responsibility. GEO Group lawyers argued in a recent court filing that the company is exempt from legal action because it is subject to government oversight—a function the Trump administration has largely destroyed.
GEO’s lawyers made the claim in a legal filing related to Alejandro Menocal, et al. v. The GEO Group, a case that has been ongoing for over a decade. Plaintiffs allege that GEO systematically forced Aurora, Colorado, ICE prisoners into forced labor, a similar complaint to that of detainees in Delaney Hall. But GEO says it has “qualified immunity,” a doctrine the Supreme Court invented out of whole cloth that is meant to protect government officials from cases brought against them as individuals. As the Innocence Project explained, the doctrine “shields public officials from liability for misconduct, even when they have broken the law.” The doctrine only applies to cases against government officials as individuals, according to Cornell Law School.
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GEO attorneys, however, say their company qualifies as a public official because government officials oversee it. Besides, its attorneys wrote, “enduring a trial is itself offensive to the immunity and undermines the government’s ability to hire and retain capable contractors.”
A successful ruling for GEO would have far-reaching consequences, because it would establish that government officials may hire contractors to commit abuses for which they want to avoid liability, attorneys told the Prospect. While the doctrine protects individual officials, it does not protect the government from public censure or criminal charges.
“Particularly given everything that we’re seeing right now about the types of things that the government is doing to Americans and other people living in this country, it is deeply disturbing, the prospect that all of that could be shielded from any kind of accountability,” said Juno Turner, litigation director of Towards Justice, co-council in Menocal v. GEO. Plaintiff’s attorneys note that GEO’s claim is the second time it has argued that it is immune from legal action. The Supreme Court unanimously ruled against the corporation when it first tried that four years ago.
The doctrine of “qualified immunity” is meant to protect government officials from cases brought against them as individuals.
GEO Group has customarily used the federal government as an excuse to evade accountability, while simultaneously drawing at least $1.2 billion in taxpayer money across 550 contracts over the last two decades. Its CEO, George Zoley, has repeatedly appeared before elected officials to stonewall and point the finger back at ICE. In 2020, for example, he told Rep. Joe Neguse (D-CO) that he didn’t know if he had the ability to give 24 hours’ notice to the families and lawyers of detainees before they are transferred to another facility. “I would have to look into our ICE procedures and whether I’m allowed to do something like that,” he said. In response to questions from a group of Democratic senators and representatives about Trump’s immigration detention warehouses in March, Zoley simply did not respond, lawmakers’ staff members told the Prospect.
A spokesperson for GEO Group did not respond to questions via email.
MENOCAL v. GEO IS JUST ONE of several lawsuits against the corporation over its alleged forced labor and other crimes against immigrant prisoners, including its practices in facilities in California and Washington state, its latest annual report shows.
The detention camp at the heart of one of the most recent lawsuits is Delaney Hall, where prisoners have been on a labor and hunger strike since May 22. Like the detainees who’ve previously sued the company, those held at Delaney Hall say GEO Group’s staff forces them to work for as little as $1 a day, and sometimes for nothing more than a soda or nothing at all—“economies” that enable GEO Group’s profits to remain sky-high, as the Prospect reported on May 28.
New Jersey Department of Health Commissioner Dr. Raynard E. Washington filed suit against GEO on June 2, after the company prevented him from investigating “significant concerns about public health conditions” at Delaney Hall, including overcrowding, lack of ventilation, lack of medical care and hygiene, unsanitary food and drink preparation, “and the unchecked spread of communicable diseases like COVID-19 and Influenza,” the lawsuit states, as well as tuberculosis, which the Prospect noted last August is circulating in multiple detention sites. GEO staff did let Washington inside but blocked him from all the sites related to the complaints, including the medical unit, toilets, showers, ventilations, HVAC, and sleeping areas.
The conditions inside have worsened since the strike began, and GEO staff prevented at least one lawmaker, Sen. Andy Kim (D-NJ), from speaking with prisoners about it. During an oversight visit this weekend, guards told him he was not allowed to speak to detainees, even as some of them urgently called his attention to a woman curled in pain on a bed. Guards refused to answer his questions about her. Some of the striking prisoners and their families say that guards are retaliating against the prisoners by denying medical care, beating them, and moving some out of the camp and into facilities far from their loved ones.
The day before her successful election, Rep. Analilia Mejia (D-NJ) conducted an oversight visit and met with some of the people inside, including one man whom a guard hit in the face as part of a beatdown to break the strike, which sent multiple detainees to the hospital. Instead of bringing the man back to Unit 2, where most of the strikers are imprisoned, guards put him in solitary confinement for four days, Mejia said. She also said guards are threatening strikers with transfers to Louisiana and slashing visitations from one hour, three to four times a week, to half an hour just once a week. She also said that GEO staff are denying detainees access to their mail unless they have a certain amount of money in their commissary account.
GEO staff have targeted Martin Soto in particular, the prisoner whom ICE suspects of leading the hunger and labor strike and whose wife, Gabriela, has organized protests outside Delaney Hall. Guards threw him in solitary confinement, then violently transferred him to a different ICE facility in Elizabeth, New Jersey, where Mejia witnessed deep bruising on his wrist, arm, bicep, and ankles. He told her that a guard said he was moved because his wife was a “troublemaker.”
Mejia has created a spreadsheet to document medical neglect in New Jersey’s detention sites. Both the Associated Press and KFF Health News have recently reported that such neglect is rife in ICE concentration camps across the country. Mejia met one detainee whose dentures were either lost or broken and who now has no way to chew solid food.
“He’s been there for four months with no teeth, and all they feed him is Ensure and soft foods,” she said, referring to a type of meal replacement drink. “They won’t take him to a dentist to get dentures.”
Another woman Mejia spoke to is diabetic; GEO staff unilaterally decided to cut one of her medications from the 2,000 milliliters her doctor had prescribed to 500 milliliters. GEO staff tried to tell Mejia that her doctor made the change, but could not produce any proof. Staff are also failing to check her blood sugar regularly; when they did so, they found it was between 200 and 300 milligrams per deciliter (mg/dL). A normal blood sugar level is below 140 mg/dL, according to the Mayo Clinic.
“They’re systematically shorting this woman her medication,” Mejia said. “They could kill her. Having uncontrolled sugar over time, it can kill her.”
So far, Mejia has collected stories of 30 people whom GEO staff are medically abusing. Like the striking prisoners and their families, she said she wants ICE to release all medically vulnerable people, including those with cancer, chronic diseases, or who are pregnant. Her second demand is to provide adequate legal representation, an issue Gov. Mikie Sherrill addressed on Thursday when she announced $20 million in funding for the Detention Deportation Defense Initiative, and also unveiled an initiative to provide rapid emergency immigration defense.
Protesters have been outraged by Sherrill’s other responses to ICE abuses, as The Guardian reported Friday, especially by her decision to send in state police and her repetition of old tropes blaming violence on “people coming from out of state to create chaos and dangerous situations.” One protester told the Prospect last week that he was sick of hearing the “outside agitators” line and said that when people from other states join the protests, it’s because Delaney Hall represents a national issue. On Sunday, ICE announced the death of yet another immigrant detainee, the 19th so far this year. Georgia national Mamuka Artmeladze was 43 years old when guards found him unresponsive at Winn Correctional Center in Louisiana on June 4. He died shortly thereafter. His cause of death is pending an autopsy.
Mejia called on her fellow congressmembers to exercise their right to conduct surprise oversight visits of the concentration camp network, as she and other New Jersey representatives have been doing on a weekly basis. For-profit companies with multimillion-dollar contracts to run prisons must treat human beings “with the decency and justice they deserve,” she said. “I want us to continue to be the eyes and ears inside that facility for as long as it takes.”
