(
Larry Valenzuela
/
CalMatters/CatchLight Local
)
Topline:
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.
Why it matters: 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 (A limited number of calls were free during the pandemic, but that’s recently been revoked, advocates said.)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...
In the rainforest-covered province of Tshopo in northeastern Congo, fear began with whispers. Late last year, villagers circulated alarming stories that a mysterious illness was causing men’s geni...