Alexandra F. Levy is a senior staff attorney at the Human Trafficking Legal Center, which filed an amicus brief in support of immigrant detainees in Menocal v. GEO Group.
Who stands to gain from the Trump administration’s immigration policies? Not the children who have been forcibly seized from their parents. Not asylum seekers fleeing violence in their countries. Not the United States — or its standing in the world. One possibility? Private for-profit prison companies.
The two largest private prison contractors in the United States, GEO Group and CoreCivic, house thousands of immigrant detainees across the country. These corporations now face allegations that they force immigrant detainees to perform unpaid labor inside their facilities.
Since President Trump took office, immigrant detainees have brought five separate human trafficking and forced labor lawsuits against these two private prison companies. (An earlier case was filed in 2014.) The lawsuits allege that GEO Group and CoreCivic compelled the detainees to work cleaning toilets, showers and communal housing units without pay and under threat of punishment.
