By Ayden Bolin
“A multi-billion dollar corporation is trying to get away with paying its workers $1 per day. That shouldn’t happen in America, and I will not tolerate it happening in Washington,” Bob Ferguson, the Washington State Attorney General, said.
Ferguson is suing the privately-owned Northwest Detention Center (NWDC) for this reason.
The lawsuit cites the detention center paying detainees in snacks or $1 per day for labor. Because the prison is privately run and for-profit, Ferguson has announced that the prison should be providing its workers with minimum wage, as the work of the detainees has been “netting the company millions in ill-gotten profits.”
The detention center is privately operated by The GEO Group Inc. on behalf of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The Office of the Attorney General states that GEO is the nation’s second-largest private prison provider. According to a local detainee activism group, the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project (NWIRP), the facility can hold up to 1575 detainees, making it one of the largest immigration detention centers in the country.
The lawsuit was filed in Pierce County Superior Court on Sept. 20. According to the Office of the Washington State Attorney General, the written worker protection law (RCW 49.46.010(k)), exempts “Any resident, inmate, or patient of a state, county, or municipal correctional, detention, treatment or rehabilitative institution,” from the protections. The lawsuit, however, claims firstly that the detainees of the NWDC are not exempt, because the detention center is a private, for-profit facility.
Because of this, Ferguson argues that “GEO unjustly enriched itself, meaning it profited by its illegal actions exploiting its workers.” Another group heavily involved in the Tacoma area’s representation of detainees is the NWDC Resistance. Their website states that the organization is “a grassroots undocumented-led movement that works to end the detention of immigrants and stop all deportations.” The group brings to light many issues involving inhumane treatment of detainees at the NWDC, citing a hunger strike and the demands of its leaders as the root of their mission.
“On Friday, March 7, 2014, approximately 1,200 immigrants held at the Northwest Detention Center began refusing meals. The hunger strike continued for 56 days, and two more hunger strikes were organized that same year with strikers demanding improved detention conditions and an end to deportations,” the NWDC Resistance website states.
The NWDC Resistance are advocates for the detainees of the NWDC, and cite abusive behavior by guards towards detainees, months-long waits for court hearings and poor standards of living in the facility, among other injustices and concerns the detainees have raised against the detention center.
This is an issue that has a base of activism on the University of Puget Sound campus as well. Advocates for Detained Voices, also known as ADV, is a group that works in solidarity with the NWDC Resistance and the detainees organizing inside of the NWDC, according to the club’s president Rose Pytte.
The group is active off campus in attending protests every other week, known as “Solidarity Saturdays,” where they join NWDC Resistance and other activists outside the facility to make the demands of the detainees more visible. Much of the battle is also being waged against the system that private prisons have been allowed to operate under in this country.
“Basically, we provide a presence at the Northwest Detention Center to say that we are not okay with this place existing, we are in support of the families who have to come from far away to visit their loved ones, and also we are in support of the people who are organizing inside of the detention center,” Pytte said.
ADV is also focused on campus-wide education on topics surrounding immigration justice and its tie-ins with racism and colonialism. The NWDC is specifically a detention center for people of pending immigration status, a fact that many take issue with on an institutional basis. In addition, the group attempts to make campus safer for people of pending immigration status.
“We support policies that are aimed at making UPS a better place for undocumented students,” Pytte said.
ADV is also showing support for this lawsuit; however, it does want to be clear that what would be best for the institution of private prisons would not be to reform them, but to dissolve them entirely.
“ADV is really glad that this lawsuit is happening. It’s way, way past the time when it should have happened. It makes sense that this is the place to start, the problem with minimum wage. There’s also a whole list of demands that the hunger strikers have made, and all of their demands point to the fact that they are not being treated as humans by the Northwest Detention Center,” Pytte said.
The lawsuit being put forth by the Attorney General is a long-overdue step towards reform in this private-prison system; however, the battle for many stretches far past reform and into a territory of immigration rights and recognizing the ways racism and nationalism impact people in Tacoma, as well as communities all over the United States.
“This is a step towards recognizing the inhumanity of the entire system, and this is not the fact that they aren’t being paid minimum wage, it’s that this is an inhumane system and the detention center shouldn’t exist, and other detention centers shouldn’t exist,” Pytte said.
Puget Sound students who would like to become more involved in this issue should reach out to Advocates for Detained Voices, as well as the NWDC Resistance.