The women were moved to a dirty, unhygienic space and forced to work cleaning the area.
Tacoma, WA — 24 immigrant women detained by Immigration Customs Enforcement (ICE) at the private Northwest Detention Center (NWDC) run by GEO Group Inc. in the city of Tacoma, contacted La Resistencia; a group led by immigrants, with complaints of having been transferred without reason by GEO guards from unit C3 to unit D2 on Saturday at 9:00 am. Unit D2 was a unit of men who in turn were transferred to A1 along with another group of men, also without explanation. The women reported that they were forced to clean the sleeping, eating, and bathroom spaces of D2 to make it habitable. Specifically, the unit had not been cleaned after being vacated and was dirty and infested with flies. The mattresses and bedding were dirty; the beds were not made. The bathroom water in the taps and showers was very dirty, described as “black water.” The bathrooms were full of excrement. Excrement was observed in many places on the floor of bathrooms and homes. There were flies everywhere in the unit due to the dirt. The stench was palpable. A volunteer who visited one of the detainees confirmed all the information during her visit.
The detained women spent six hours trying to clean up the dirt and mess. The guards seemed not to know the reason for the transfer or the lack of cleaning before transferring the women to this module. The detainees complained and said that they had to be paid for the cleaning. The guard in charge told them that they were the ones who would live there and not her. She even looked for “volunteers” to clean the entire unit.
All of this contradicts GEO Group Inc.’s decision to end the “voluntary” work program in October 2021, after losing a Washington state lawsuit in court for not paying the minimum wage to people who work in the private facilities. Starting in 2021, GEO Group is supposed to hire people to handle the basic cleaning they are required to provide to people detained in their facilities under the contract the corporation has with ICE. However, many detainees have complained that they are forced to clean the units and do not receive a single payment. The corporation’s contracted cleaning crew does not clean at the rate necessary for the number of people detained at the facility, leaving detainees alone having to choose between cleaning and not getting paid or trusting GEO’s cleaning crew to do minimal cleaning or no cleaning at all.
“Now we are 60 women in total in D2. Before being transferred, all the women were afraid of being transferred to another state, many began to cry. The unit (D2) smelled of urine, everything was very dirty. Dart, the guard in charge of a unit, brought us cleaning supplies. We spent almost the entire day cleaning because we had to clean walls, all the mattresses, bathrooms, change the shower curtains and more,” one detained person told La Resistencia.
This violation of Washington state labor law and GEO’s decision regarding detained people working at NWDC comes less than a week after 72 people began a hunger strike, the fifth of the year recorded by La Resistencia, demanding better nutrition and access to food trays without the restriction of having to present identification to obtain it. Over the weekend, most people stopped the strike after ICE negotiated to provide better food and eliminated the requirement to show identification to get a food tray. However, two people remained on hunger strike demanding their immediate release, one of them told La Resistencia: “I would rather die of hunger than return to Afghanistan to be tortured and killed.”
La Resistencia will continue to work with detainees to ask the Washington State Attorney General to intervene and help the women recover owed wages, recording daily abuses and human rights violations, and will work to close the facility.
La Resistencia is a grassroots organization in Washington state led by undocumented people who stand in solidarity with those detained at the Northwest Detention Center and fight for the closure of the facility and an end to all detentions and deportations.
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