Ted S. Warren/AP Photo
A detainee works in a kitchen area of the GEO Group’s Northwest ICE Processing Center in Tacoma, Washington, September 10, 2019. Last month, a federal jury began deliberations on whether GEO must pay minimum wage to detainees who perform such jobs.
In March of 2014, after 21 months in detention, Hassall Moses landed in solitary confinement at the Northwest ICE Processing Center (NWIPC) in Washington state, run by the GEO Group, a private prison company. Moses was already in the middle of a hunger strike when he decided to write a letter to other detainees encouraging them to stop working to protest inedible food, abusive guards, and low pay for doing the facility’s cooking, cleaning, and maintenance. “This facility is run by detainees,” Moses said in an interview that his attorney recorded. “If everybody stopped working, we could negotiate [a] pay raise because everybody is working for $1 a day now; we could talk about the quality of the food, the living conditions.”
But Moses’s letter was intercepted. In These Times reported that shortly afterward, officials at the facility asked for volunteers to discuss the issues. Instead, these men also ended up in solitary confinement “for participating in a group demonstration.” The reprisals failed to knock the Washington state detainees off-kilter. Instead, hunger strikes spread to another GEO facility in Texas. By the time the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant crusade began two years later, immigration activists had been organizing blockades outside the NWIPC, known in the state by its former name, the Northwest Detention Center (NWDC), holding rallies to support the detainees as conditions deteriorated, and calling on state and local officials to shut the detention center down.
The 9/11-inspired Patriot Act gave private prison companies the momentum they needed to dominate the business of immigration detention.
It took nearly a decade, but detainees and immigration advocates can generate the public pressure required to force private prison companies out of the immigration sector. In April, Washington Gov. Jay Inslee signed HB 1090 to prohibit private, for-profit prison companies from contracting with government agencies by 2025, making it the third state after Illinois and California to ban immigration detention centers operated by private prison companies.
Since 2005, the GEO Group, the country’s second-largest private prison corporation, has owned and operated NWDC under contract with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). With 1,575 beds, NWDC is the fourth-largest detention facility in the country and the only private detention facility in Washington. In 2020, GEO reported total revenues of $578 million. Last year, over 80 percent of detainees were from Mexico and Latin America; 85 percent were men and 15 percent women. Fewer than 15 percent had criminal records.
Angélica Cházaro, a University of Washington School of Law assistant professor, co-founded the grassroots organization La Resistencia to support the 2014 hunger strikers, served as a chief negotiator for the group, and continues to work with detainees today. “You can draw a direct line between those first hunger strikes and the bills now,” she said, “because so many of the problems that the hunger strikers were pointing out came from the fact that the GEO Group has an extreme profit motive and runs the facility with that in mind.”
Seattle’s U.S. Immigrant Station and Assay Office was one of the first detention centers in the country when it opened in 1932 and housed mainly undocumented Chinese immigrants under the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. The federal government began detaining Latin American immigrants at the center after World War II. Complaints about poor-quality food and dirty uniforms are not new; when Esmor, another private corrections firm, began managing the Seattle facility in the 1980s, “immigrants barricaded themselves in their rooms to protest conditions.”
The 9/11-inspired Patriot Act gave private prison companies the momentum they needed to dominate the business of immigration detention. In anticipation of overcrowding in Seattle, the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) called for expanded detention areas and earthquake upgrades. Shortly afterward, the INS facility moved to cheaper land in Tacoma—next to a contaminated Superfund site. The state’s Economic Development Finance Authority issued nearly $112 million in municipal bonds to fund the facility’s construction and future renovations. The agency then doubled the population to about 500 detainees and promptly transferred ownership to the GEO Group.
When detainees protested dangerously undercooked food or a lack of air-conditioning, ICE shifted responsibility to GEO, while GEO claimed it adhered to its contract with ICE. (ICE’s nationwide track record is poor: Congress has allocated about $5 billion for immigrant detainee mental health and nutrition nationwide; ICE used some of those funds for dog food, leashes, and other equipment, according to a report from the Center for Health Law Policy and Bioethics at the University of San Diego.) For its part, Tacoma says it isn’t responsible for enforcing city health and safety codes inside the center, according to La Resistencia’s Hunger Strikers Handbook.
Local and state officials had avoided the debate over the facility, claiming immigration detention was a federal issue. When Rep. Adam Smith (D-WA) first visited the facility in 2014 to meet with hunger strikers, he saw the “sometimes inedible” rations and listened to personal stories of families ripped apart. Two months later, he introduced the Accountability in Immigration Detention Act to create a committee to oversee conditions, require transparent record-keeping, and prohibit retaliation against whistleblowers, but the bill did not advance.
The pandemic has only brought to light more instances of the appalling conditions detainees still face at NWDC.
In 2017, La Resistencia documented that over 750 detained immigrants refused meals, highlighting food comparable to “dog food,” the recent doubling of overinflated commissary prices, and inhumane wages—detainees had recently been “given a bag of chips in exchange for several nights of waxing the prison’s floors.” The women in the facility began their own hunger strike that included demands for soap and water to wash their clothes and contact visits so they could hug their children.
By then, the Tacoma City Council had seen enough, enacted an emergency ordinance limiting NWDC’s expansion, and later voted to ban new or expanded detention and correctional facilities. (GEO later sued the city in federal court, saying NWDC was an “essential public facility” under Washington’s Growth Management Act, but the state’s Growth Management Hearings Board upheld the city regulations when GEO appealed.)
The GEO Group is now suing the state, arguing that the April 2021 law “would unconstitutionally subvert federal authority.” State Attorney General Bob Ferguson also sued GEO for allegedly paying workers $1 a day—far below Washington’s minimum wage of $13.69 per hour. The case ended in a mistrial in June, and Ferguson is retrying the case.
The pandemic has only brought to light more instances of the appalling conditions detainees still face at NWDC—and their willingness to resort to hunger strikes to force some accountability. They have protested the recent transfer of prisoners exposed to COVID-19 to NWDC and demanded that the Washington State Department of Health have access to the center, test people for COVID-19 before they arrive, and provide vaccines. As of June 30, the center had 84 confirmed COVID cases among roughly 500 detainees.
Yet GEO still claims that its facilities are well run. “Our ICE processing centers are highly rated by national accreditation organizations and have provided high-quality and culturally responsive services for over 30 years under both Democratic and Republican administrations,” said Pablo Paez, a GEO Group executive in a May earnings call.
NWDC is currently scheduled to close by 2025, and the GEO Group continues to take hits. The company’s stock price has decreased nearly 40 percent since July 2020. If NWDC closes, GEO could lose roughly $246 million in revenue between September 2021 and September 2025, along with an additional $101 million invested in constructing and outfitting the center.
“If you’re looking for a stock that will fare fundamentally worse under a Biden presidency, it’s hard to top The GEO Group,” The Motley Fool’s Rick Munarriz had noted the day before the 2020 election. “The operator of private prisons and other detention centers is going to be on borrowed time if Biden wins the White House.”
With fewer people in detention nationwide during the COVID-19 pandemic, eliminating immigration detention in private facilities could further decrease those numbers, assure that detainees receive humane treatment, and weaken the private companies that profit from these barbaric places.
