The U.S. Supreme Court refused this week to rescue The GEO Group from a lawsuit accusing the corporation of exploiting immigrant detainees for labor inside a Colorado detention facility.
The decision was unanimous.
And while procedural, it carries weight.
For more than a decade, immigrant detainees held at GEO’s Aurora facility have alleged they were compelled to clean, scrub, cook, and maintain the very cages confining them — often for no pay, or for $1 a day. Plaintiffs argue this was not some optional “volunteer program,” but a system designed to keep costs down and profits high.
GEO claims it should be immune from accountability because it operates under federal contracts. In other words: We were just doing the government’s work.
A lower court rejected that argument. The company rushed to the Supreme Court of the United States, asking the justices to shut the case down before it could move forward.
The Court said no.
That refusal matters.
Because this is not simply about janitorial duties. It is about the structure of a detention regime that warehouses migrants — many of them asylum seekers — and then uses their labor to sustain the machinery of their own confinement.
The Florida-based GEO Group is one of the largest private detention operators in the United States, managing or owning roughly 77,000 beds across 98 facilities. This is not marginal business. This is an industry.
An industry built on incarceration contracts.
An industry sustained by federal immigration policy.
An industry that has repeatedly faced allegations of abusive labor practices. In Washington state, GEO was ordered to pay more than $23 million in a similar case.
And still it argues immunity.
This is the larger pattern: Privatize enforcement. Monetize detention. Externalize accountability.
The arrest last year of Ras Baraka, the mayor of Newark, during a protest at a federal immigration detention facility underscores how deeply contested these sites have become. Charges were later dropped. The underlying system remains.
When corporations profit from confinement, the question is not whether labor programs are “voluntary.” The question is whether economic coercion operates inside locked doors.
When people are detained, separated from family, denied work authorization outside, and dependent on the institution for basic survival — what does “choice” mean?
The Supreme Court did not answer those questions.
But it refused to silence them.
And that alone signals something important: The courthouse doors remain open.
For the detainees in Aurora, the case continues.
For the country, the debate over who benefits from immigrant detention — and at whose expense — is far from over.