Federal Jury Awards $17.3 Million to Detained Immigrants Paid $1 a Day at Tacoma ICE Facility

For years, the Northwest ICE Processing Center in Tacoma operated on a labor model that GEO Group, the Florida-based private prison company that ran the facility, called voluntary. Detainees were asked to cook, clean, do laundry, and perform other work that kept the center running. The pay was $1 per day. Washington State's minimum wage during the class period ran as high as $13.69 per hour.

In 2017, Schroeter Goldmark and Bender filed a federal class action on behalf of the detainees, arguing that Washington's Minimum Wage Act applied to GEO the same as any private employer. The lawsuit, Nwauzor v. GEO Group, Inc., eventually consolidated with a parallel action brought by Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson. Together, the cases went to trial before Judge Robert Bryan in the U.S. District Court in Tacoma.

The firm's trial team, led by Adam Berger and including Lindsay Halm, Rebecca Roe, and Carson Phillips-Spotts, presented evidence that GEO earned $18.6 million in profits from the Tacoma facility in 2018 alone and internally acknowledged it could have paid workers more. The jury was asked to decide whether federal law or GEO's contracts with the government shielded the company from state wage obligations.

On October 27, 2021, the jury returned a verdict in favor of the class. It found GEO liable and awarded $17.3 million in back wages to the approximately 10,000 people who had worked at the facility since 2014. Two days later the court confirmed the back-pay figure at $17,297,063. The judge then separately awarded $5.95 million to the state on its unjust enrichment claim, bringing the combined judgment to roughly $23.25 million. In 2022, the court added $6.25 million in attorney fees, costs, and pre-judgment interest of $8.09 million, bringing the total to approximately $37.6 million.

GEO Group appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, arguing that federal law preempted Washington's wage statute. On January 16, 2025, a Ninth Circuit panel affirmed the judgment in full, holding that GEO is a private for-profit employer and that nothing in federal law or in its government contract excused it from paying the state minimum wage.