A sign that reads “shut it down” is pictured at the Northwest Detention Center as people attend the Peoples Tribunal Against the Detention Center event in Tacoma, Washington, on February 26, 2017. (Photo: JASON REDMOND / AFP / Getty Images)
For three years now, incarcerated immigrants have staged hunger strikes and work stoppages to protest conditions at the Northwest Detention Center, an immigration jail in Tacoma, Washington, run by a private prison company that pays detainees as little as $1 a day to work in the jail.
“This week folks were offered chips or a soup for several nights of waxing the floors, so not even $1 [per] day,” one person incarcerated in the jail recently reported to NWDC Resistance, an immigrant-led group fighting to end the deportation and detention of immigrants.
Immigration defendants held at the jail are under constant surveillance.
Five hunger strikes have been held so far this year, with participants and whistleblowers facing solitary confinement, threats of forced feeding and other forms of retaliation from prison authorities, according to NWDC Resistance.
Their efforts paid off on Wednesday when Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson announced a lawsuit against GEO Group, a massive private prison firm that runs the Northwest Detention Center under a federal contract. Ferguson argues that the company has netted millions of dollars in “ill-gotten profits” by violating the state’s minimum wage law and paying defendants as little as $1 a day for laboring in the jail, according to a release.
Maru Mora Villalpando, a spokesperson for NWDC Resistance and Latino Advocacy in Washington, told Truthout that defendants held at the jail are under constant surveillance and are told that anything they do or say could impact their immigration case, so alerting Ferguson’s office to labor abuses and organizing hunger strikes was a big risk. Still, they chose to fight back.
“At the end of the day, this victory is the hunger strikers’ victory, and we want…