Around the country, people are held in detention facilities over immigration issues. Some of the people being held in these facilities may be undocumented immigrants, while others may have arrived legally, and may include those trying to obtain student visas and green cards. Nonetheless, these people may be held in detention.

One of the places where this may be occurring is in Arizona, at facilities like the CoreCivic ICE Eloy Center, in Eloy, Arizona.

CoreCivic is one of the companies that run these detention facilities, a for-profit prison company. According to The Sentencing Project, though CoreCivic facilities hold only around 10 percent of the prison population in the country, they may hold up to 70 percent of people in migrant detention. 

To make matters worse, CoreCivic may be forcing detainees to perform labor for as little as a dollar a day, using threats, coercion, and violence to get detainees to perform labor.

One such facility that may be forcing detainees to perform labor is the CoreCivic ICE Eloy Center. CoreCivic also has four other CoreCivic detention centers in Arizona – two more in Eloy, and two in Florence, Arizona. They include:

• Eloy Detention Center
• La Palma Correctional Facility (Eloy)
• Central Arizona Florence Complex
• Florence Correctional Center

Forced Labor

The 13th Amendment abolished slavery and indentured servitude except as punishment for a crime, meaning that prisons can make prisoners work without compensation. However, this rule does not apply to people not convicted of a crime; unadjudicated individuals cannot be forced to work without pay.

Former detainees of CoreCivic centers have filed lawsuits against the company, saying that they were unlawfully forced to perform labor while being detained.

One such lawsuit notes that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has instituted a Voluntary Work Program. Though the description of the program provided by ICE says that the program “provides detainees opportunities to work and earn money while confined” the program allows facilities detaining immigrants to not pay them more than a dollar a day to perform work. 

However, many detainees argue that what is advertised is not voluntary work at all, but is forced labor. The Nation says that former detainees were forced to perform tasks like laundry and managing the commissary shop for a dollar a day. Allegedly, they were also mandated to clean the facility quarters without pay, and were forced to labor under threats of solitary confinement and physical restraint. 

The Nation reported that the American Civil Liberties Union says that a 2012 investigation of ICE detention facilities in Georgia confirmed these statements, and noted that in some cases, detainees were forced to work at their dollar a day wage just so they could afford food while detained.

The Nation goes on to note that the dollar-a-day rate comes from a rate arbitrarily set by the Geneva Conventions, and originally applied to a rate of pay given to prisoners of war.

The Project on Government Oversight’s overview of migrant detentions says that there is no justification to apply such a wage to detainees at places like Arizona-based CoreCivic ICE Eloy Center, or any other detention centers, and that slave labor is not acceptable. 

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This article is not legal advice. It is presented
for informational purposes only.