WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court agreed Monday to hear an appeal from a private prison company facing a lawsuit claiming immigration detainees were forced to work and paid a $1 a day in Colorado.
The GEO Group appealed to the high court after a judge refused to toss out the 2014 lawsuit saying the detainees had to perform both unpaid janitorial work and other jobs for little pay to supplement meager meals.
The company says the lawsuits are really a back door way to push back against federal immigration policy, and its pay rates are in line with Immigration and Customs Enforcement regulations.
They say the migrants can’t sue because it’s running Aurora, Colorado, facility on behalf of the government, which is immune from such lawsuits.
Attorneys for the migrants say the lawsuit is only about people being paid “almost nothing” for their work, and the contract didn’t require them to pay so little.
A lower court judge allowed the lawsuit to go forward and the U.S. 10th Circuit Court of Appeals found it couldn’t review the immunity claim before trial. The GEO Group argued to the Supreme Court that government contractors should be able to argue that issue on appeal quickly.
The Florida-based GEO Group is one of the top private detention providers in the country, with management or ownership of about 77,000 beds at 98 facilities. Its contracts include a new federal immigration detention center where Newark Mayor Ras Baraka was arrested at a protest in May.
Similar lawsuits have been brought on behalf of immigration detainees elsewhere, including a Washington state case where the company was ordered to pay more than $23 million.
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Associated Press writer Mike Catalini in Trenton, New Jersey, contributed reporting.
