13th Amendment - Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

You’d be hard pressed to find a more apt description of forcing detainees to maintain their own concentration camp than “involuntary servitude.” It would be bad enough if it was a government run camp. But now sprinkle on some capitalism because GEO Group is a publicly held corporation, structurally obligated to maximize profit for its shareholders.

Why wouldn’t we want to extract profits from the very survival of human beings? Let’s think through this for a second. The only customer a private prison company can have is governments. For simplicity we’ll talk about the federal immigration context, but the analysis is true of all government customers.

The Federal Government has a fixed rate per day they’ll pay for housing an immigration detainee. So how can a corporation maximize profit, given fixed revenue? Reducing expenses is the only option on the table in the immediate term. Longer term I’m sure GEO Group and CoreCivic are lobbying Congress to increase the daily rate. But this week, how can they squeeze out a few more dollars from Black and brown bodies? Cutting costs is the only lever they’ve got.

So how do you cut costs? You serve deli turkey meat 2 meals a day. You don’t throw away that deli meat just because a few maggots have shown up, or it’s a slimy shade of gray that means you’d never send it to school in your kid’s lunch box. Can we limit how much food we supply and require detainees to buy supplemental food from us via highly inflated commissary prices? Great idea! Is there a food supplier who supplies even lower quality food? Sign us up!

Now we’re slowly, but steadily, starving people, but the capitalists’ hunger is insatiable, they demand more profits. So let’s cut medical care to the bone, not have doctors on site 24/7. Because clearly any potential patient can just scoot over to to the 24/7 urgent care, right? Oh wait, no they’re locked inside, and a trip outside would cost fuel and maybe overtime to still cover staffing the facility, so that’s not an option. Well I’m sure you’ll survive until a doctor comes in tomorrow morning.

What about that overtime though. What if we just didn’t hire more staff. We’ve got all these people here, they can’t go home at night or work outside our walls. What if we made them do the work? Who needs kitchen staff when we can make them do it. Cleaning staff seems like an optional expense, just give the detainees a bucket and mop. And given it’s a “free market” (LOL, no) we can pay a wage that the market dictates. $1/day seems like the going rate, and who are we to doubt the market.

Given how prevalent wage theft is outside of our concentration camps, I’m sure these paragons of virtue definitely aren’t underreporting hours, or “withholding pay,” or just straight up stealing from detainees. Because what’s the one thing profits love more than involuntary servitude? Enslaving people!

And you might wonder, why would the Government want this? It clearly is more expensive to pay for the cost plus profit of a corporation than just running the concentration camp directly as the government right? Ah, but you’re not pricing in the accountability sink.

By using a contractor, now the government gets to disown anything that goes on within the camp. GEO Group employee sexually assaulting detainees? We told them not to allow sexual assault. Low quality, spoiled food? We told them they have to serve quality food. Assaults? We told them not to do that.

Oh they did all those things even though we told them not to? Well it’s a ten year contract so I guess when it comes up for renewal we’ll consider shifting the contract to one of the 3 or 4 other private prison companies, who despite similar histories of abuse and corruption, don’t have that history at THIS facility.

This is why Biden’s DOJ weighed in on the side of CoreCivic, who operates NJ’s other private prison, when NJ tried to ban private prisons. Because no matter which party is in power, the slavish devotion to capitalism, and the desire to look away from the dehumanization of our neighbors, are two things that always find folks willing to reach across the aisle.

Acting

Put some good in the world. Show the kid heading to school that you see and support them, even if they’re getting bullied at school, or don’t feel safe telling their parents.

Reading

Women at Delaney Hall demand firing of a guard they say is sexually assaulting detainees by Steve Strunsky

“One of the demands is that they fire the guard who is sexually assaulting them,” Adorno said, adding the detainees had been touched inappropriately.

She said the female guard, a GEO Group employee, had been the subject of 10 complaints of sexual assault or abuse, including groping, but that GEO had not suspended or fired her.

…

Speakers during the press conference included Archange Antoine, a minister with the Clergy Coalition for Liberation. Antoine, who is African American, compared the current struggle of undocumented immigrants and their families to the Civil Rights Era. He likewise described immigrants’ widespread detention as part of America’s broader, long-running “mass incarceration” of Black and Brown people.

“President Trump will not give us justice. Mikie Sherrill will not give us justice. No Newark mayor’s going to give us justice. The justice is going come when we decide to organize together, and strategize and fight together,” Antoine said.

“We are on the right side of history,” Antoine added, his booming oratory rousing the small crowd outside Delaney Hall. “We are on the right side of justice!”

The Delaney Hall Strike Is Exposing a Massive Thirteenth Amendment Crisis by Madiba K. Dennie

Forced labor practices like these are pervasive throughout ICE detention centers. In February, for example, the Supreme Court ruled on an immigrant labor case involving a GEO Group-operated facility, in Colorado. The company’s “so-called Sanitation Policy,” as Justice Elena Kagan referred to it in her majority opinion, required detainees to clean all of the facility’s common areas without pay or risk increasingly severe punishments, including solitary confinement. Additionally, “the so-called Voluntary Work Program” offered detainees a dollar a day for other necessary work like preparing food and doing laundry. 

Former detainees had sued, arguing that these policies violated the forced labor provision of a federal anti-trafficking law, as well as Colorado’s prohibition on unjust enrichment. And GEO Group tried to get the case dismissed, claiming it was following directions from the government, so the trial cannot proceed. The Supreme Court didn’t buy it, which means that the case, GEO Group v. Menocal, can at least proceed to a jury trial.

Among the reasons GEO Group does not like trials: Trials can be very expensive for GEO Group, cutting into the money they make by coercing detainees to work for free. In a 2017 case involving another GEO Group-run ICE facility, the state of Washington and migrants detained at a detention center in the state both sued the company for violating Washington’s Minimum Wage Act. GEO Group fulfilled its contractual obligations with ICE by relying heavily on detainees whom it paid only one dollar a day, which GEO Group estimated saved it from having to hire 85 additional full-time employees. In 2021, a jury awarded the detainees roughly $17.3 million in back pay, and the court awarded $5.9 million in unjust enrichment to the state. GEO Group appealed, but the Ninth Circuit affirmed the ruling last year.

Since Trump’s return to office, the legal landscape has started to shift. Last year, in early January, the National Labor Relations Board filed a formal complaint against GEO Group. The NLRB alleged that GEO Group violated the rights of workers detained at an ICE facility in California by punishing the organizers of a labor and hunger strike with solitary confinement and transfers out of state. Within a few weeks of the complaint’s filing, however, Trump reentered the White House and fired members of the NLRB, and the remolded agency withdrew the complaint.

The Delaney Hall Strike Is Exposing a Massive Thirteenth Amendment Crisis | Balls and Strikes

The Delaney Hall Strike participants haven’t been convicted of anything—and are still being forced to work for nothing.

The Delaney Hall Strikers Are Hitting GEO Group Where It Hurts by Sophie Hurwitz

What began as a simultaneous hunger and labor strike has become largely a labor struggle, organizers with the immigrant rights group Cosecha New Jersey told me. That strike, according to a letter signed by 46 detained people and published June 3, is near-unanimous and ongoing: “people detained have all voluntarily stopped working and assisting with facility operations,” they wrote in a May 31 letter titled “We Demand Freedom.” 

The for-profit firm GEO Group, ICE’s largest private contractor and Delaney Hall’s operator, runs what it calls a “voluntary work program” that in effect keeps the center operating, described in a recent GEO Group detainee handbook reviewed by Mother Jones.

“Any resident assigned to work in the kitchen will be paid $4.00 per day,” the handbook says. That’s the highest wage anyone gets: “Laundry Work Details and Barbershop Workers will be paid $3.00 per day. Special Work Details are paid $2.00 per day. All other job assignments are $1.00 per day. Ordinarily you will not be permitted to work more than eight hours per day or 40 hours per week.”

The document also lists the cost of a pair of shoes at GEO Group’s commissary: $24.28, equivalent to several weeks’ wages. A blanket costs eight dollars. ID cards, which detained people must pay to replace if damaged, cost $5 each, or a full week’s pay.

While the work program is labeled as voluntary, “encouraging others to participate in a work stoppage or to refuse to work” is listed in the detainee handbook as a “high offense,” punishable by disciplinary transfer, isolation, or initiating criminal proceedings.

The Delaney Hall Strikers Are Hitting GEO Group Where It Hurts – Mother Jones

There's a lot of profit in paying immigrants a dollar a day to run their own jail—until they refuse.

A LETTER FROM THE MARGINS by Mo Husseini

Understand, I am nobody. I want to be exact about this, because exactness is the only vanity I have left. I am, if we are being precise, exactly fucking nobody. I am one man with a keyboard and a groaning bookshelf, commanding exactly no army, moving exactly no markets, and existing in a world that has organized itself so efficiently around my nobody-ness that my irrelevance requires citations and a notarization for the simplest claim.

I cannot even write the smallest true sentence I own,

“I am Palestinian,” without a stranger arriving to dispute it, to explain to me that the noun is an invention, that the identity is an unfounded rumor, that I am a rounding error holding a flag.

And it is not my politics that are being audited. It is my existence. And when your existence is under audit, you learn the auditor’s language so young that you can forget, for thirty or forty years, or fifty years, that you have never agreed to the audit at all.

Deny the Holocaust on LinkedIn, under your own name and photograph. Your career will be over by dinner, which, to be clear, is as it should be, because that is what a civilization looks like once it has decided a people’s catastrophe is beyond dispute.

Now write that there is no such thing as a Palestinian, that the people are an invention, and the Nakba a lie. Nothing will happen to you. A few Palestinians might chime in. But from others? A yawn, maybe. You might catch a few likes from people with flags in their bios. A sitting cabinet minister said it at a podium in Paris and flew home to his portfolio with no consequence.

…

‘The West’ here is a lazy phrase, and I am not in a lazy mood, so let me be precise about who carries the auditor’s clipboard. The editor, friendly, progressive, genuinely fond of you, who wants one more pass to make the piece a little less angry. The politician who marches for every justice on the map and goes quiet at this one, because his donors are watching. The kind soul at a dinner party who needs to hear you condemn Hamas before passing the salt, the loyalty oath as amuse-bouche. The broadcaster who says clashes while one of the parties has an air force and the other builds rockets out of irrigation pipe.

…

I am writing this in the auditor’s language, with the auditor’s grammar, deliberately, because the clerk’s ink is the only ink this office has ever recognized. But I am also choosing to burn the paper of the application and use it to burn down the office. A form burns just as well in official ink. This essay is the application, taken back off the desk and set alight in front of the window. What you are reading is the smell.

A LETTER FROM THE MARGINS. - by Mo Husseini

On the price of being heard, of the story in the glosses, and the love beneath the rage.

New Jersey's Mikie Sherrill rejects criticism of State Police response at Delaney Hall by Ry Rivard

“Nobody [was] certainly killed in this instance,” she said in a Wednesday night radio interview.

Governor Sherrill set the very high bar for the New Jersey State Police. Don’t kill anyone. The State Police were happy to brutalize protestors, gas and flashbang people far behind the front lines of the protest, and evict the mutual aid tents. All escalations that ICE had not yet taken. All acts for which Sherill must take full accountability.

https://www.politico.com/news/2026/06/04/mikie-sherrill-rejects-criticism-police-response-delaney-hall-00949539