(Tania Bernal/California Immigrant Youth Justice Alliance)
Two immigrant detainees have been held in solitary confinement for over a week for backing a labor strike seeking better wages and conditions at the privately run facility where they are held in Bakersfield, the men told KQED.
The alleged retaliation fuels fear and intimidation, according to interviews with the men, their attorneys and advocates.
Mohamed Mousa and Pedro Figueroa said they were moved to a restricted housing unit after signing a declaration on June 28 that they and 15 others were joining a months-long peaceful work stoppage by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detainees who are paid $1 a day to clean dormitories and bathrooms.
Employees with The GEO Group, a large private prison company that operates the Mesa Verde ICE Processing Center in Bakersfield, transferred the men separately to “administrative segregation” on June 29 and June 30, according to GEO forms viewed by KQED.
“This is what they’re doing to retaliate against people who speak up. This is what they’re doing to intimidate us, which I am intimidated,” Figueroa, 33, said by phone as he sat in what he described as a small, windowless cell detainees refer to as “the hole.”
“I chose not to work and voice my opinion respectfully, and that’s within my right,” Figueroa, a former incarcerated firefighter who battled the massive August Complex fire in 2020, added. “I’m trying to understand, what did I do wrong?”
Documents show GEO staffers...
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