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Geo Group, a for-profit prison company, is gaining a surge in value under President Donald Trump. Investors are putting a big bet on immigration detention. The stock price doubled after Election Day.
But despite its rising fortune, the $4 billion company continues to resist the government having to pay detainees more than $1 a day for cleaning facilities at the facilities they have been forced to live with.
In the 1,575-bed detention center, Geo is run for immigration and customs enforcement in Tacoma, Washington, where detainees once prepared meals, provided laundry wash toilets, scrub-equipped toilets, and otherwise required 85 full-time employees. At the time, the state’s minimum wage was $11 an hour. (It’s now $16.66.) In 2017, Washington sued GEO and carried out it, and in October 2021, federal ju judges unanimously ruled in the state’s favor.
This year, Geo and Washington are back in court for the third time as they try to reverse previous decisions the company sided with the state. Geo brings contract vacuums to the Tacoma facility while the lawsuits occur, maintaining detainees a way to earn paid work and committee money.
Legal fights have national consequences as the number of ice detainees across the country rises to the highest level in five years. The majority take place in private facilities run by competitors of companies like GEO or Corecivic. If the state’s minimum wage becomes the norm, Trump’s immigration crackdown could otherwise cost the country even more. Unless the private detention centre decides to absorb costs or reduce cleaning, Tacoma detainees have already filed charges against GEO.
Geo constitutes the lawsuit as a fight over the federal government’s authority to enact national law. Several courts have held that the Fair Labor Standards Act, which sets a federal minimum wage, does not apply to immigrants who are detained. The issue with the Tacoma case is the state’s minimum wage.
“Simply put, I believe that Washington state is unconstitutional in the U.S. Constitution’s superiority clause,” Geo wrote in a news release.
The company did not respond to requests for comment from Propublica. ICE and Corecivic declined to comment.
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Geo’s latest Legal Salvo came out last month.
A panel of three judges at the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals recently upheld a lower court decision. GEO had to pay the state minimum wage at the Tacoma facility. The company was also ordered to hand over $17 million in spinal wages and $6 million for “unfair enrichment.” The total penalty was less than 1% of GEO’s total revenue in 2024.
GEO petitioned for a ninth circuit rehearsal on February 6th. The news release vowed to “he will vigorously pursue all available complaints.”
It’s not that GEO is not capable of paying, the company has revealed its legal application. Gross profits from the Tacoma facility today, called the Northwest Ice Processing Center, were about $20 million a year when Washington filed the lawsuit. The company told a judge in 2021 that it could “pay 20 decisions.”
The real problem is the precedent that the Tacoma case can be set. GEO, who manages 16 ice detention facilities across the country, faces similar lawsuits in California and Colorado. Additionally, the California incident before the 9th Circuit has pending results in Washington. Colorado is passing through lower courts.
GEO is expected to fight cases all the way to the Supreme Court if necessary.
If ultimately forced to pay the state minimum wage across the nation, the company can decide to pay more detainees to more employees everywhere, or hire outside employees.
The company was also able to try to renegotiate its long-term contract with ICE, but incarceration expert Lauren-Brooke Eisen said in an article in the Brennan Judicial Center.
Alternatively, GEO could respond to higher labor costs in a different way. Following the 2021 ju-decision decision, the company suspended Tacoma’s voluntary work program, rather than paying a minimum wage to detainees. Some people couldn’t afford to call their families. (For such detainees, the program was never entirely voluntary. “I desperately need the money,” he testified. “I have no choice.”)
The facility was “really bad” after the sudden shutdown, a Mexican detainee told The Associated Press at the time. “No one cleaned anything.”
Geo eventually brought in a contract cleaner.
Mike Falk, a spokesman for the Washington State Attorney General’s Office, said testimony on the minimum wage issue highlights the issue of housing detainees in private prisons. Not only did Geo pay $1 a day for cleaning in Tacoma, but he also budgeted less than a dollar for each meal each detainee ate, one kitchen worker testified. “That’s why food performance is terrible,” Falk said of the detainee’s testimony. “He routinely chose grasshoppers/insects from his food.”
Geo argues that Washington unfairly and hypocritically wants to keep Tacoma facilities to a standard that even state facilities don’t need to meet. The company notes that Washington Act carbate exempts state prisons from minimum wage requirements, allowing states to pay prisoners under $40 a week. The federal government, which took the side of GEO, cites the same in its “friends of the court” brief under both the first Trump and Biden administrations. So did the opposition judges in the recent 9th Circuit decision.
However, comparing the state’s prisons to privately run immigration facilities is a comparison of “apples and oranges,” the 9th Circuit has decided. Washington does not let private businesses run state prisons. And Tacoma immigrants are in custody under civil charges, not as convicted offenders.
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As the judge noted, GEO’s contract with ICE states that prison companies must comply with “all applicable federal, state and local laws and standards,” including “labor laws and codes.” GEO also believes that detainees must pay at least $1 a day for their voluntary work programme. The federal government “made a deliberate choice to direct the minimum rate to be geographic,” the 9th Circuit wrote in its latest decision, but “made a deliberate choice to not direct the maximum rate to be geographic.”
The situation in Tacoma has worsened as the number of detainees increases, according to Maru Mora Villalpando, founder of activist group La Resizeencia. The group is in regular contact with people within the detention center.
According to Mora Villalpando, the meal service stated, “Dinner was 5 years old. Then I was 6 years old. I’m now 9 years old.”
She said too. Without the detainee’s labor, external cleaners must do it all.
“But these people,” Mora Viralpando said, “We can’t keep up.”
