ATLANTA — A lawsuit filed against Georgia’s largest immigrant jail charges the private prison company that runs it broke federal anti-slavery laws by forcing detainees to work against their will.
The detainees were being held at Stewart Detention Center, one of the busiest immigrant prisons in the U.S., operated like many such facilities by CoreCivic, a Nashville-based corrections company.
Immigrants say threats of punishment — and a need to earn money to buy food to supplement the center’s diet — pressured them to take prison jobs that pay between $1 and $4 per day. Earlier this summer, the plaintiffs’ legal team asked for class certification, meaning upwards of 40,000 migrants currently or formerly under the custody of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) could be covered by the suit, first filed in 2018.
