What $1 a Day Actually Costs a Human Being

You are locked inside a building you did not choose to enter. You are not a criminal. You have not been convicted of anything. You are a civil detainee, which is the government’s sterile term for a person whose immigration paperwork is still being sorted. You could be here for weeks. You could be here for months. You do not know which it will be.

The facility you are locked inside has to be fed, cleaned, and maintained every single day. Someone has to cook breakfast, lunch, and dinner for a facility that holds up to 1,575 people. Someone has to process industrial loads of laundry seven days a week. Someone has to scrub the communal bathrooms, mop the kitchen floor, clean the recreational areas. That someone is you. And several hundred of your fellow detainees who are in exactly the same position.

The company running this facility — GEO Group, a corporation listed on the New York Stock Exchange — will pay you one dollar for a full day of that work. One dollar. Not per hour. Per day. In the same state, at the same time, the legal minimum wage for any private employer is $16.28 an hour. GEO is paying you approximately one cent per hour, if you work an eight-hour shift.

You do this work anyway. Not because it is a good deal. Because you are trapped, and because a dollar is the difference between silence and a phone call to your family. Because working gives you something to do with your body and your mind that is not lying on a cot staring at a ceiling. Because the guards become people to you when you work alongside them, instead of just uniforms. These are the reasons GEO’s own attorneys presented in court to justify paying you one dollar. GEO described your participation as a program that provides “meaningful activities” and “valuable work experience.” They were not being ironic.

One detainee, deposed for this case, was asked why he participated in the work program when it paid almost nothing. He answered in five words: “I need the money desperately.” Then he added: “I have no choice.”

That is the full moral ledger. GEO banked between $18.6 and $23.5 million in gross profit per year from a facility kept running largely by workers who had no choice. The court record shows GEO estimated it would need to hire 85 additional full-time outside employees if it ended the detainee work program. That means the real-world value of that program to GEO — the labor it was receiving for $1 per person per day — was worth the equivalent of 85 full-time salaries. GEO saved millions. The people doing the work received pocket change. When a court finally told GEO to pay the legal wage, it chose to take the program away entirely rather than share a fraction of its margin.

There is no other word for this. The court record contains it. The jury found it. The Ninth Circuit affirmed it. GEO ran a wage theft operation on a captive population of human beings who, by the court’s own finding, had no meaningful alternative but to work.

What the Court Record Actually Says

The following are verbatim passages from the Ninth Circuit’s January 16, 2025 opinion in Nwauzor v. The GEO Group, Inc., No. 21-36024. These are not paraphrases. These are the court’s own words.

The Damage Beyond the Courtroom

Public Health

The NWIPC’s basic sanitation and food service depended structurally on detainee labor. When GEO chose to suspend the VWP entirely rather than pay minimum wage, the documented consequences landed directly on detained people’s daily lives.

• Detainees who had been earning money through the VWP lost their primary or only source of cash income inside the facility. This directly cut access to phone calls, personal hygiene supplies, and commissary items that are not provided by GEO as part of baseline detention.
• The suspension of the VWP has been in effect since October 28, 2021. As of the date of the Ninth Circuit’s decision, detainees at NWIPC had been without the program for over three years. The court record confirmed this as a direct consequence of GEO’s choice not to comply with the wage order.
• GEO’s own kitchen operation relied on “nearly one hundred detainees each day” to prepare meals, cook, serve food, and wash dishes. The thirteen full-time outside kitchen staff were documented as “absolutely” unable to meet demand without detainee labor. The sudden removal of that workforce would have created operational strain on food service quality and capacity.
• The dissenting judge in the case acknowledged that GEO’s argument about “hunger strikes or outbreaks of disease” causing temporary drops in VWP participation reveals that GEO used financial incentives to keep sick and protesting detainees working. Raising pay to $5 during a disease outbreak to fill labor gaps is a documented practice in this record.
• Detainees at NWIPC are civil, not criminal detainees. Many are lawful permanent residents. The psychological impact of unpaid or near-unpaid compelled labor on people who have committed no crime, and who do not know when they will be released, is unquantified in the financial record but documented in testimony.

Economic Inequality

The GEO Group’s wage theft at NWIPC did not happen in a vacuum. It is part of a documented business model that extracts profit from populations with the least power to resist.

• GEO is a publicly traded corporation. Its shareholders received profits built in part on the gap between $1 per day and the legal minimum wage. Between 2010 and 2018, GEO extracted between $18.6 and $23.5 million in gross annual profit from the NWIPC. The back pay judgment of $17.287 million covering 2014–2021 shows this was a sustained and material practice.
• GEO’s contract guarantees it a minimum of $700 million over ten years from the federal government, funded by taxpayers. That guaranteed revenue base gave GEO the financial stability to litigate this case all the way through the Ninth Circuit rather than settle. Wage theft victims, by definition, do not have that kind of financial runway.
• The wage gap between what detainees were paid and what any outside worker would have received for the same work is not marginal. Washington’s minimum wage was $16.28 per hour. GEO paid $1 per day. For a standard eight-hour shift, that is $130.24 owed versus $1.00 paid: a theft of $129.24 per worker per day.
• The structure of immigration detention itself creates economic coercion. Detainees cannot leave, cannot seek other employment, and cannot negotiate their pay. GEO knew this. The internal business logic of paying the minimum rate allowed is only rational in a market where the workers have zero economic mobility. That is the only market in which $1 a day is viable.
• GEO’s response to losing in court was to cancel the program entirely. This outcome means the workers received no prospective wage increase. The $17.287 million judgment represents back wages for roughly 200–470 workers over seven years. Individual recoveries, after legal costs and class distribution, are unlikely to transform anyone’s economic position.
• The dissenting judge argued that applying the minimum wage to GEO’s NWIPC operation would create “dramatic distinctions in the allowances applicable to detainees based on the happenstance of the location of their detention.” This framing reveals the systemic inequity: in states without wage protections, detained workers in identical GEO facilities continue earning $1 per day with no legal remedy.

Putting the Numbers in Human Terms

Who to Watch, Who to Pressure, What to Do

The Ninth Circuit’s ruling is final as to Washington State. GEO must pay. But GEO operates detention facilities across the country, in states without Washington’s wage protections, and the VWP continues in those locations at $1 a day.

GEO Group Corporate Leadership

The following are corporate roles at The GEO Group, Inc. as a publicly traded corporation. Specific executive names current at time of publication are not contained in the court record; pressure accordingly directed at these roles:

• Chief Executive Officer of The GEO Group, Inc.: The person in this role has final accountability for the wage policy that generated $17.287 million in back pay liability.
• Chief Financial Officer of The GEO Group, Inc.: This is the office that calculated and maintained the $1-a-day labor cost model as a profit center for over a decade.
• Board of Directors, The GEO Group, Inc.: The board approved the corporation’s decision to suspend the work program rather than comply with the minimum wage order, removing the program from approximately 200–470 detainees per day.
• ICE Contracting Officers overseeing the NWIPC contract: These federal employees approved GEO’s decision to suspend the VWP and are responsible for contract compliance terms that GEO ignored for two decades.

Watchlist: Regulatory Bodies with Jurisdiction

• U.S. Department of Labor (DOL): Has authority to investigate wage theft by federal contractors. The facts in this case are already court-adjudicated. The DOL can act on them nationally.
• U.S. Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General: Has oversight over ICE contracts, including GEO’s compliance with labor law requirements embedded in those contracts.
• Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC): GEO Group is NYSE-listed. Material litigation risk, including this $23.2M+ judgment, may require disclosure review. Shareholders have standing to demand answers about how this liability was managed and disclosed.
• State Attorneys General (Multi-State): Attorneys general from California, New York, Illinois, Minnesota, Oregon, and 11 other states filed amicus briefs supporting Washington’s position. These offices have standing and stated interest in pursuing parallel actions in their own states.
• Washington State Office of the Attorney General: Already a party to this case. Has the $5.95 million unjust enrichment judgment and an ongoing enforcement role to ensure GEO compliance with the injunction.
• U.S. Congress, House Judiciary Committee: Has oversight jurisdiction over ICE, the GEO contract structure, and the adequacy of the $1-a-day detainee pay standard that has not been updated since 1979.

Grassroots Resistance and Mutual Aid

• Support La Resistencia: The organization filed an amicus brief in this case and directly supports detained people at NWIPC. Direct monetary donations fund commissary support, phone cards, and legal navigation for detainees inside.
• Support Northwest Immigrant Rights Project: Filed amicus in this case; provides direct legal representation to detained immigrants facing deportation proceedings. Legal representation is the single most material factor in immigration case outcomes.
• Support National Immigrant Justice Center: Filed amicus; provides legal services, policy advocacy, and public education on immigration detention conditions nationally.
• Support Fair Work Center (Seattle): Filed amicus; organizes workers in Washington and can connect community members to wage enforcement resources and labor rights education.
• Divest from GEO Group: GEO Group trades on the NYSE under the ticker GEO. Pension funds, university endowments, and municipal investment portfolios may hold GEO stock. Demand divestment from your local institutions. The financial case is straightforward: GEO carries $23.2M+ in adjudicated liability and faces replication of this litigation in other states.
• Contact your federal representatives directly: The $1-a-day detainee wage standard is set by Congress. No one has updated it since 1979. The ask is specific: update 8 U.S.C. § 1555 to require that detainee labor in any federal detention facility, public or private, be compensated at the applicable state minimum wage.
• Amplify the case record publicly: The full Ninth Circuit opinion is a public document. Share it. The court’s own language is more damning than any summary. Make GEO’s shareholders, neighbors, and politicians read the words “I need the money desperately. I have no choice.”