NO to Coerced Labor In North Carolina

I am writing to ask what protections you will support for detainees before GEO Group opens its proposed ICE detention center in Winton, North Carolina. Most people held in immigration detention are not serving criminal sentences. Immigration detention is civil custody, not criminal punishment, and many detained people have no criminal conviction at all. Yet detained people will depend on Geo Group which will control nearly every aspect of their lives, including housing, food, medical care, communication, movement, commissary access, and work. A pattern of labor abuse in privately operated ICE detention centers has already developed. In Washington, Attorney General Bob Ferguson sued GEO Group over its practice of paying detained people approximately $1 per day for cleaning, kitchen, laundry, maintenance, and other work at the Northwest Detention Center. The Ninth Circuit affirmed the judgment against Geo Group in January 2025. See https://clearinghouse.net/case/16361/ for details. Similar allegations were raised in California, in NLRB Case No. 31-CA-309785, involving retaliation against detained workers who protested wages and working conditions at GEO’s Mesa Verde facility. A summary is available at https://www.ccijustice.org/post/nlrb-complaint-against-geo. This case was withdrawn shortly after President Trump removed NLRB General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo and Board member Gwynne Wilcox, demonstrating that protections for detainees must be legislative, not administrative in nature. North Carolina should act before similar abuses occur here. The state should require independent inspections, confidential access to attorneys and advocates, protection against retaliation, transparent reporting of work assignments and wages, and enforceable penalties for violations. Our state’s shameful history of convict-leasing during the Jim Crow era makes this especially important. North Carolina made extensive use convict leasing and other forms of coerced labor to exploit Black people. That history is described at https://www.ncpedia.org/convict-labor. The ICE private detention center in Winton must not become a modern version of that system. What legislation, contract conditions, and oversight mechanisms will you support to ensure that detained people in Winton cannot be exploited or silenced?