DENVER, Colorado — A 12-year-old class-action lawsuit over alleged forced labour inside a privately run immigration detention centre in Aurora ended on Monday, November 2, not with the jury trial that was hours away, but with a settlement. Attorneys for thousands of former detainees confirmed to Colorado Public Radio (CPR News) that a proposed settlement had been reached with the GEO Group, the for-profit company that operates the facility for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
Source: Colorado Public Radio (CPR News)
The timing was dramatic. Jury selection in the trial had been scheduled to start on Monday morning in the U.S. District Court for the District of Colorado, potential jurors were gathering and answering questions, and opening statements were expected on Tuesday morning. Instead, plaintiffs' attorneys David Seligman and Hans Meyer confirmed the agreement on Monday, November 2. Details of the settlement were not disclosed, and the deal still needs the approval of a federal judge before it takes effect.
Source: Bloomberg Law
What the detainees alleged: work for $1 a day, or solitary confinement
The case is known as Menocal v. GEO after its lead plaintiff, Alejandro Menocal, who was detained in Aurora for a few months in 2014. Menocal alleged that he was forced to do hard labour inside the facility or else he would be physically restrained in solitary confinement, CPR News reported. Immigrants in the class alleged they were paid $1 per day for work that kept the facility running — maintenance, food service, janitorial work and laundry — and that this arrangement unjustly enriched the GEO Group, because detainee labour let the company run those services for pennies by the hour and maximise its profits.
Menocal sued on behalf of immigrants detained at the facility in Adams County over the course of a decade, from 2004 to 2014. Every one of those claims remains an allegation the company disputed: the settlement announced on Monday is not a court finding that the GEO Group broke the law, and the company has not admitted the plaintiffs' account. The GEO Group did not have an immediate comment on the proposed settlement on Monday, CPR News reported.
GEO's defence, and the road through the Supreme Court
The GEO Group, which operates for-profit prisons and immigration detention centres across the United States as a federal contractor, pushed back for years on a core argument: that as a federal contractor it could not be held accountable under the same laws that apply to other businesses, because it was doing what the federal government asked it to do. The case wound its way up through the federal courts for more than a decade and reached the U.S. Supreme Court, which decided 9–0 last year that Menocal could proceed with his claims — the ruling that set up Monday's trial date.
“At its core, this case is about our clients who are real people in our community standing up to a multinational corporation that engaged in profiteering from this forced labour,” Hans Meyer said. “This is the first step in holding this corporation accountable for exploiting human beings.” In a joint statement the plaintiffs' attorneys added: “Our clients suffered the inhumane treatment alleged here while locked up in a detention center just a few miles from the federal courthouse.” (Both statements via CPR News.)
Seligman, who runs the advocacy law firm Towards Justice, had made the plaintiffs' cost argument plain on Friday, before the settlement: “That's what this trial is about. GEO is all about cutting costs. And it makes billions of taxpayer dollars a year. So whatever corners it's able to cut, that money goes to its executives and shareholders, and the evidence we're going to put forward in this trial is that the way they've been able to do that is through exploiting a captive labor force.” Meyer and Seligman also told CPR News that the fact the more-than-a-decade-old case was finally going to trial at all was itself a victory, reached “in the face of long odds.”
Why this matters beyond Aurora
Private detention is a large and growing part of the U.S. immigration system: companies such as the GEO Group are paid with taxpayer money to hold people who are awaiting immigration court decisions — people who, in cases like the Aurora class, had not been convicted in the proceedings that put them there. The Menocal case tested whether the labour rules that protect ordinary workers also reach inside those facilities, and whether a contractor can answer abuse allegations by pointing at its government contract. For Punjabi and other South Asian readers in the United States, the issue is not abstract: Punjabi asylum seekers and other immigrants from Punjab routinely pass through ICE detention centres run by private contractors while their cases are decided, and the $1-a-day work programmes at issue in Aurora are a standard feature of that system.
Law360, which also reported the settlement on Monday, described the case as a 12-year-old class action in which former detainees alleged the ICE contractor “unlawfully profited from the detainees' forced labor.” Because the terms were not disclosed on Monday, what class members will actually receive — and what, if anything, changes inside the Aurora facility — remains unknown until the approval process plays out.
Source: Law360
What happens next
A proposed class-action settlement is not final until a federal judge approves it. Bloomberg Law reported, citing the settlement notice filed on Monday, that the plaintiffs will by December begin the steps needed to obtain the court's approval, and will at that stage disclose the terms of the settlement and how any funds would be distributed. Until then, the amount, the number of people who will be paid, and any conditions on the GEO Group stay under wraps — and the jury that gathered in Denver on Monday morning goes home without hearing the case.