At $1 per day, detained immigrants' labor cheap

Sunday, May 25, 2014

HOUSTON -- The kitchen of the detention center was bustling as a dozen immigrants boiled beans and grilled hot dogs, preparing lunch for about 900 other detainees. Elsewhere, guards stood sentry and managers took head counts, but the detainees were doing most of the work -- mopping bathroom stalls, folding linens, stocking commissary shelves.

As the federal government cracks down on immigrants in the country illegally and forbids businesses to hire them, it is relying on tens of thousands of those immigrants each year to provide essential labor -- usually for $1 a day or less -- at the detention centers where they are held when caught by the authorities.

This work program is facing increasing resistance from detainees and criticism from immigrant advocates. In April, a lawsuit accused immigration authorities in Tacoma, Wash., of putting detainees in solitary confinement after they staged a work stoppage and hunger strike. In Houston, guards pressed other immigrants to cover shifts left vacant by detainees who refused to work in the kitchen, immigrants said.

Last year, at least 60,000 immigrants worked in the federal government's nationwide patchwork of detention centers, which is more than the number of immigrants working for any other single employer in the country, according to data from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The cheap labor saves the government and private companies $40 million or more a year by allowing them to avoid paying outside contractors the $7.25 federal minimum wage.

Unlike inmates convicted of crimes, who often participate in prison work programs and forfeit their rights to many wage protections, these immigrants are civil detainees placed in holding centers, most of them awaiting hearings to determine their legal status. Roughly half of the people who appear before immigration courts are ultimately permitted to stay in the U.S. -- often because they were here legally, because they made a compelling humanitarian argument to a judge or because federal authorities decided not to pursue the case.

"I went from making $15 an hour as a chef to $1 a day in the kitchen in lockup," said Pedro Guzman, 34, who had worked for restaurants in California, Minnesota and North Carolina before he was picked up and held for about 19 months, mostly at Stewart Detention Center in Lumpkin, Georgia. "And I was in the country legally."

Guzman said that he had been required to work even when he was running a fever, that guards had threatened him with solitary confinement if he was late for his 2 a.m. shift, and that his family had incurred more than $75,000 in debt from legal fees and lost income during his detention. He was released in 2011 after the courts renewed his asylum visa from Guatemala, which had mistakenly been revoked, in part because of a clerical error. He has since been granted permanent residency.

Officials at private prison companies declined to speak about their use of immigrant detainees, except to say that it was legal. Federal officials said the work helped with morale and discipline and cut expenses in a detention system that costs more than $2 billion a year.

"The program allows detainees to feel productive and contribute to the orderly operation of detention facilities," said Gillian Christensen, a spokesman for the immigration agency. Detainees in the program are not officially employees, she said, and their payments are stipends, not wages. No one is forced to participate, she added, and there are usually more volunteers than jobs.

A 1950 law created the federal Voluntary Work Program and set the pay rate at a time when $1 went much further. (The equivalent would be about $9.80 today.) Congress last reviewed the rate in 1979 and opted not to raise it. It was later challenged in a lawsuit under the Fair Labor Standards Act, which sets workplace rules, but in 1990 an appellate court upheld the rate, saying that "alien detainees are not government 'employees.'"

Detainees are typically compensated with credits toward food, toiletries and phone calls that they say are sold at inflated prices. (They can collect cash when they leave if they have not used all their credits.)

"They're making money on us while we work for them," said Jose Moreno Olmedo, 25, a Mexican immigrant who participated in the hunger strike at the Tacoma holding center and was released on bond from the center in March. "Then they're making even more money on us when we buy from them at the commissary."

Some advocates for immigrants express doubts about the legality of the work program, saying the government and contractors are exploiting a legal gray area.

"This in essence makes the government, which forbids everyone else from hiring people without documents, the single largest employer of undocumented immigrants in the country," said Carl Takei, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union's National Prison Project.

Jacqueline Stevens, a professor of political science at Northwestern University, said she believed the program violated the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery and involuntary servitude except as punishment for crime. "By law, firms contracting with the federal government are supposed to match or increase local wages, not commit wage theft," she said.

Immigration officials underestimate the number of immigrants involved and the hours they work, Stevens added. Based on extrapolations from contracts she has reviewed, she said, more than 135,000 immigrants a year may be involved, and private prison companies and the government may be avoiding paying more than $200 million in wages that outside employers would collect.

A Section on 05/25/2014