California says ICE detainees have labor rights. They earn $1 a day scrubbing bathrooms

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Even with all the industries where Californians went on strike during last year’s “hot labor summer,” some of the most active sites of organizing in the state may well be a pair of private immigration detention centers in the Central Valley.

The Mesa Verde and Golden State Annex facilities, operated by The GEO Group, a Florida-based federal detention contractor, have been a hotbed of activism since the pandemic. But it’s not The GEO Group’s staff agitating for better pay and working conditions.

It’s their detainees — immigrants awaiting the outcomes of deportation cases or asylum claims, many of whom also work where they’re jailed, scrubbing bathrooms and cutting hair for $1 a day.

Detainees in the two Kern County facilities said this month they started the second labor and hunger strike in two years to protest poor working and living conditions. Two years ago, they sued over the program’s wages.

And during the 2022 strike, they prompted California workplace safety regulators to inspect the Golden State Annex facility and issue a citation to The GEO Group — showing how far the state is pushing the traditional boundaries of labor rights.

The case, alleging a “willful and serious” violation of state labor laws meant to prevent the spread of COVID-19, has turned heads. Labor and immigration policy experts believe it is the first time the state has treated detained immigrants as employees who benefit from workplace safety protections. The case is before a three-member appeals board of Cal/OSHA — the state’s occupational safety and health agency — as California grapples with whether to expand labor rights to state prisoners , including a proposition on the November ballot .

Even more novel: The state’s Division of Occupational Safety and Health in May sent the U.S. Department of Homeland Security a request not to deport seven complainants for at least two years, under a Biden administration program to temporarily protect immigrant workers who are assisting with labor investigations.

“Cal/OSHA cannot properly pursue enforcement action without the cooperation of worker detainees in these situations,” agency chief Debra Lee wrote.

It’s “highly unusual, if not unique” for the state to ask federal immigration authorities to temporarily waive deportation for state witnesses against the immigration authorities’ contractor, said Anastasia Christman, senior policy analyst at the National Employment Law Project.

Cal/OSHA spokesperson Erika Monterroza declined to comment on the case as it is being appealed by the company. A U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) spokesperson also declined to comment.

The GEO Group’s corporate counsel Spencer Winepol did not respond to multiple requests for comment about detainees’ complaints, the Cal/OSHA citation or the current labor and hunger strikes.

The company, in its appeal of the citation and in prior public statements, has denied that detainees should be considered employees who were exposed to workplace hazards. It also argues the alleged violation was only technical, and has been corrected.

In the complaint, detainees said they weren’t informed of close contacts with others who had COVID-19; the state’s citation alleges the company did not maintain a required written plan for preventing the spread of the virus.

The company “vehemently disputes the notion that any of these individuals are employees,” attorneys for The GEO Group wrote to a Cal/OSHA appeals board administrative law judge in April 2023. “Rather, the named detainees were voluntary participants in a federally established Voluntary Work Program, designed to offer rehabilitation and job skill training.”

If the citation is upheld, it would be a victory for immigrants’ advocates who have pushed unsuccessfully for years to curb private detention facilities in California.

“It is uncharted territory both in terms of worker issues but also uncharted territory overall about what California can and can’t do versus these private entities,” said Hamid Yazdan Panah, advocacy director of Immigrant Defense Advocates, which has backed a ban on private detention in California. “We’ve continuously pushed the envelope on that.”

California fights private detention centers

In one of many moves against the Trump administration, state lawmakers in 2019 tried to ban private immigration detention centers from operating in California.

The for-profit facilities “contribute to over-incarceration” and “do not reflect our values,” Gov. Gavin Newsom said in a statement when signing the bill.

Instead, the Trump administration expanded immigration detention beds in California, including with The GEO Group, a global private prison giant that reported $2.4 billion in revenues last year. Under its new contract, the company opened the Golden State Annex facility in McFarland and immigration authorities began sending detainees there in 2020.

ICE pays the company to hold as many as 880 immigrants in its Golden State Annex and Mesa Verde facilities, though the numbers have been far lower, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse , a regularly updated database of immigration records at Syracuse University.

The company and federal government sued over California’s ban. It was ultimately overturned last year by the 9th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals, which ruled the state was unconstitutionally overstepping on federal immigration enforcement.

But during the COVID pandemic, as outbreaks hit Mesa Verde and other ICE detention centers in California, there appeared to be confusion over whether local health departments had jurisdiction. Advocates called for stricter regulations.

In 2021, Newsom signed a law clarifying the facilities had to abide by local and state health orders. Another provision made them subject to state workplace safety rules.

One of the complainants in the Cal/OSHA case said he was sent to Golden State in late 2021, after being released from a state prison. But the living conditions, such as the food, were worse in the detention centers, he said.

The man, who was released last year after nearly two years in detention, spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of jeopardizing ongoing legal cases. He said that he contracted COVID-19 in a dorm room with dozens of other detainees — allegations echoed in the Cal/OSHA complaint.

“I’m not going to say prison is a good thing, but a state prison is far more well-conditioned to be housed in,” he said.

Detainee jobs worse than prisoners?

The jobs were worse, too, the former detainee said, even as most California prison jobs pay less than 74 cents an hour .

ICE requires its detention contractors to provide voluntary work programs that improve “essential operations and services” and reduce the “negative impact of confinement” through “decreased idleness, improved morale and fewer disciplinary incidents.” While the work can take as many as eight hours a day, ICE requires the jobs to pay “at least” $1 a day; its contracts with The GEO Group show that’s how much the company budgets for the program.

Many participants take the jobs to afford food and hygiene products from the commissary, or phone calls to family. (A limited number of calls were free during the pandemic, but that’s recently been revoked, advocates said.) Common assignments include cleaning the dorms and bathrooms, and cutting fellow detainees’ hair.

Some even help care for other detainees. Ever Oropeza-Paz, who has been detained at the Golden State Annex for nearly two years, said he spent several months working as an aide for a dormmate who had a mental health condition. Oropeza-Paz said he was paid $1 a day to assist with basic tasks such as buying items in the commissary, using a tablet to communicate and teaching him how to shower.

“People are forced to work,” said Oropeza-Paz, who does not currently have a job in the facility. “They do it just to have the funds to make a quick call to their relatives.”

Critics of immigration detention have challenged the work program’s legality around the country.

Washington state’s attorney general and a group of detainees sued The GEO Group in 2017, arguing participants should have been paid the state minimum wage, which was $11 an hour at the time. A federal jury decided in 2021 the company owed $17 million in back wages to hundreds of immigrants who had cooked and cleaned.

In a lawsuit challenging the program at The GEO Group’s detention center in Adelanto, California, a federal judge decided in 2022 the detainees should be considered employees because the contractor paid them and dictated their hours and working conditions. The case is on hold as the Washington case is appealed.

And in July 2022, nine detainees at Mesa Verde and Golden State, represented by attorneys at the the California Collaborative for Immigrant Justice, sued The GEO Group over the work program’s wages.

At Golden State, the advocacy organization also helped file a workplace safety complaint. Detainees there complained of cleaning black mold without protective equipment, black dust in the heating and air conditioning system, and a lack of COVID-19 notification and testing protocols.

“There’s fungus on the bathroom floor, on the shower walls,” said the former detainee who made the comparison to state prisons and who echoed allegations in the Cal/OSHA complaint. “We weren’t given the proper equipment, we weren’t given the proper chemicals … We didn’t even get a small talk of what everything’s for.”

The detainees staged a work stoppage that summer. It ended up lasting nearly a year, into 2023, and escalated into a hunger strike . In a civil rights complaint to the Department of Homeland Security and a 2023 lawsuit , detainees claimed they experienced retaliation, including having family visits suspended and being placed in solitary confinement. They withdrew the suit when they ended the strikes.

The company told KQED in 2022 it didn’t consider detainees “choosing not to participate in a voluntary work program” to be on strike, and told other local media outlets last year that allegations of abuse were “baseless.”

A recent inspection of Golden State by the Department of Homeland Security’s internal watchdog office found GEO Group staff were slow to respond to some medical complaints from detainees, and hadn’t fixed leaks that regularly caused pools of water on the floor, “forcing detainees to live in a potentially dangerous setting.”

But the department’s inspector general said the work program didn’t violate any ICE policies.

Detention company resists

Cal/OSHA accuses The GEO Group of resisting state inspections, according to case records obtained by CalMatters through a public records request.

After the agency opened an investigation in June 2022, The GEO Group “refused to produce any documents pertaining to worker detainees, taking the position that worker detainees are not employees” and told inspectors to request documents from ICE, Cal/OSHA senior safety engineer Greg Clark later declared in a court filing. But an August 2022 memo shows GEO employee and facility administrator Minga Wofford told Clark’s colleague that ICE wanted requests routed “through the facility.”

Wofford declined to comment.

When Clark and a colleague visited in August 2022 for a second inspection, Clark said the company “denied us access to worker detainees to conduct interviews with them.”

Cal/OSHA eventually got a warrant from a Kern County judge for the company to turn over documents about the work program and allow inspectors to speak with detainees. An inspector returned to the facility three times in December 2022, and issued citations that month, barely missing the six-month cutoff after which an investigation must be closed.

Among the citations are that the company blocked access to a chemical eyewash station, didn’t properly label chemicals in the barbershop and train workers on their uses, and failed to have a written plan to prevent the spread of airborne diseases such as COVID-19. Because there had been COVID cases, the agency issued that citation as a “serious” violation, bumping the total fines up to over $100,000.

Over the past year and a half, the appeals have centered on whether the California Collaborative for Immigrant Justice and other advocacy groups, representing the detainees, can also participate in the legal case.

The GEO Group has pushed back, arguing that several of the detainees involved no longer are housed in the facility and that none were exposed to actual hazards in the work program.

“The citation in question is for a written policy deficiency,” company attorneys wrote to the Cal/OSHA appeals board last October. The detainees’ attorneys and Cal/OSHA disagreed; agency attorney Lidia Marquez wrote that “worker-detainees tasked with cleaning and maintenance assignments found themselves directly exposed to the hazard” of being at a higher risk of contracting the virus.

As those proceedings dragged out, Cal/OSHA asked the federal government to help keep the complainants in the country.

Cal/OSHA first tried in April 2023, and then again in May, this time writing to the Department of Homeland Security that the case will fall apart without witnesses and naming specific immigrants the state hopes can testify. One of the witnesses Cal/OSHA had interviewed, agency director Lee wrote, had already been deported.

“There have already been an alarming number of reports by worker detainees stating they are facing retaliation for cooperating with Cal/OSHA’s investigation,” she wrote. “The loss of one witness is a setback to Cal/OSHA’s enforcement action, which is why immediate protection for the remaining witnesses is critical.”

Homeland Security declined to comment on Cal/OSHA’s request in The GEO Group case, and a spokesperson did not answer questions about the deportation protection program, known as deferred action. Earlier this year, the department said it’s granted more than 1,000 workers involved in labor investigations nationwide such protections.

It’s not clear how the department will handle California’s request. Lisa Knox, co-director of the collaborative representing detainees, said the workers are still in the process of using Cal/OSHA’s letter to apply for deportation protections individually.

Meanwhile, ICE has steadily sent more immigrants to the Golden State center. Records show the detainee population in June was more than 300 people — double the number a year ago.