Forced Labor

We represent immigrants forced to work without pay in detention.

County jails extract the labor of immigration detainees held there under contract with ICE. Those detainees are forced to perform jobs essential to the jail’s operation, like cooking, cleaning, doing laundry, and doing maintenance, that the facility would otherwise have to pay employees to do. Our lawsuits allege that they were made to do this work for nothing, or close to it, and that refusing carried consequences.

Forced labor class actions have been brought on behalf of immigrant detainees across the country, but only against private prison contractors and the companies that profit from them. Raphael Janove was the first to bring one against a municipal detention center, McHenry County, Illinois. In that case the plaintiffs defeated the motion to dismiss.

As Raphael put it in an interview about these cases: “The issue is simple … Immigrants aren’t slaves and slavery is bad.”