by Hart Celler
04 October 2026
Reading Time: ~30 minutes.
Introduction
Whether or not there should be immigration detention and if it should be a state (I mean legally, not literally, i.e., the federal government) function or a privatized endeavor are valid arguments. However, they aren’t ones I’m prepared to entertain here. This piece is limited to the state of multi-pronged hypocrisy regarding the existence of private immigration detention facilities in certain, shall we say, “Blue” states.
To trace this dichotomy, we can immediately dismiss the widely publicized warehouse conversion fiasco. The grand, federal ‘Detention Reengineering Initiative’—which promised to move away from private contractor dependence by buying up massive industrial logistics hubs and converting them into government-owned mega-jails—has officially crashed, and subsequently burned. It was a poorly thought out plan by people with no knowledge of or concern with ICE’s strict detention standards, representing an epic waste of money. Frankly, it stands as perhaps the single worst example of taxpayer-funded government waste spearheaded by people who should never have been in government—no matter how brief—and who will likely never see consequences for their poor decision-making and lack of impulse control beyond public ridicule.
One glaring absurdity is that there are undoubtedly countless shuttered jails and prisons that could have been purchased for a fraction of what was spent on light industrial warehouses across the United States. Instead, following a predictable flurry of local lawsuits, environmental injunctions, and millions in wasted tax dollars trying to retrofit buildings meant for cargo into spaces certified for human habitation, the plan collapsed. The federal government quietly abandoned the warehouse project and began transferring or selling its newly gotten overpriced gains at fire-sale prices, as it did the only thing it could do: retreated straight back to the turnkey facilities owned and/or managed by the Big 4: CoreCivic, GEO Group, LaSalle Corrections, and Management and Training Corporation (MTC).
When you strip away that administrative wreckage and look strictly at the actual, functioning residential overnight network, you are left with ~120 dedicated facilities managing roughly 41,500 beds authorized, funded, and available (all figures accurate as of September 2026). The issue is laid bare when you look at who actually holds the keys to these units, broken down into five distinct categories:
1. The Pure Federal Model, Government-Owned, Government-Operated-Go (Go-Go): 8 facilities / as-needed beds. The smallest fraction of available beds and actually owned and operated by the U.S. Government.
Examples: Beds at eight Federal prisons nationwide via Inter-Governmental Service Agreement (IGSA) with the Department of Justice’s Bureau of Prisons (BOP): FDC (Federal Detention Center) Miami, Florida; FDC Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; FCI (Federal Correctional Institution) Atlanta, Georgia; FCI Leavenworth, Kansas; FCI Berlin, New Hampshire; MDC (Metropolitan Detention Center) Brooklyn, New York; FCI Lewisburg, Pennsylvania: and FDC Honolulu, Hawaii.
While no set number of beds is specified, there have reportedly been an average of 1,126 aliens boarded per day.
2. The Underutilized Public Options (Municipal Jails): 200 to 469 facilities (disputed) / ~7,000 beds. Local sheriffs rent blocks of beds—proving that distributed public space exists, but is fragmented, and many sheriffs offices have been squeezed out by laws in their states such as New York and Maryland. I refer to this option as “underutilized” because there are an estimated 3,081 sheriffs nationwide controlling over three quarters of a million beds, 27% of which are believed to be open at any one time.
Example: The Caroline Detention Facility in Bowling Green, Virginia utilizes a regional jail authority via a standard IGSA. It is functional, existing public jail infrastructure that the government could utilize, blowing a hole in the argument that buying commercial warehouses was ever necessary. ICE will also sometimes utilize agreements belonging to the U.S. Marshal Service, so called ‘piggy-backing’ to take advantage of the 1800 agreements the service has.
3. Government-Owned, Contractor-Operated (Go-Co): 8 facilities / ~9,500 beds. This is the classic federal detention model that most people incorrectly assume applies throughout the entire system. The federal government owns the land, buildings, and underlying detention infrastructure, but contracts with private companies to handle day-to-day operations, staffing, food service, maintenance, transportation, and security. In other words, the government owns the detention center, but a contractor runs it on the government’s behalf.
Unlike the Turnkey Corporate Model (below), the federal government maintains direct ownership and long-term control of the physical facility itself. The pure Go-Go model, however, is also dissimilar in that it relies upon contractors to provide the operational expertise and workforce necessary to keep the facility running. Politically, this is often presented as a public alternative to private detention. Functionally, it demonstrates how dependent even “government-owned” detention remains on private-sector participation.
Examples: Aguadilla Service Processing Center, Puerto Rico; Buffalo Service Processing Center, Batavia, New York; El Centro Service Processing Center, California; El Paso Service Processing Center, Texas; Florence Service Processing Center, Arizona; Krome Service Processing Center, Miami, Florida; Port Isabel Service Processing Center, Los Fresnos, Texas; and San Pedro Service Processing Center, California.
4. The “Middleman” Subcontracts (Privately Managed via IGSAs): 48 facilities / ~18,200 beds. Where local governments act as shell entities to pass federal money to private operators.
Examples: The Adelanto ICE Processing Center, California was for many years, the poster child for this, when up until 2010, the City of Adelanto acted as the transaction agent for ICE while GEO ran the inside, right before the city completely divested and sold the deed directly to GEO. The Otero County Processing Center in New Mexico is legally structured as an IGSA under the county commission, but operated by the private firm MTC. Finally, owned by a company called Target Hospitality, and managed by CoreCivic with an IGSA through the City of Dilley, the Dilley Immigration Processing Center aka the South Texas Family Residential Center, Texas highlights the length to which this model is utilized. An earlier IGSA in 2014 was executed by the City of Eloy, Arizona over 900 miles away.
5. The Turnkey Corporate Monopoly, Privately Owned and Operated: 14 facilities / ~16,800 beds. The exact corporate infrastructure the warehouse plan failed to bypass.
Examples: The California City Detention Facility and Otay Mesa Detention Center historically anchored this pure corporate turnkey setup. Even after recent multi-billion-dollar DHS real estate buyouts shifted the deed of the dirt to the federal government to bypass state-level bans, CoreCivic still manages the day-to-day operations much to the State of California’s dismay.
The lesson is difficult for detention opponents but impossible to ignore. Private detention is not a small or replaceable corner of the immigration system. It is the backbone of the detention system as it presently exists.
One may dislike that fact.
One may wish Congress had built a larger government-owned network decades ago.
One may wish the warehouse experiment had succeeded.
But after years of effort, the federal government ultimately returned to the infrastructure it originally sought to bypass. That reality matters because it explains what happened next.
Once eliminating private detention outright proved impractical, political attention naturally shifted toward the contractors operating that detention infrastructure. The detainee labor cases did not emerge in a vacuum. They emerged in an environment where direct control over immigration detention remained elusive, but pressure on the contractors operating that detention remained readily available.
The Mop Bucket
There is a certain pattern that has emerged in a handful of states over the last decade.
A business becomes politically inconvenient. The state cannot ban it outright. The state cannot lawfully order it to leave. So instead it regulates, litigates, taxes, conditions, restricts, and pressures until the business model itself becomes difficult to sustain. Sometimes the company relocates. Sometimes it shrinks. Sometimes it simply stops investing. The names change. The pattern does not.
Bake the damn cake, anyone?
Immigration detention presents a unique problem for jurisdictions inclined toward this approach. They cannot order ICE to leave. They cannot abolish federal detention. They cannot terminate federal contracts. That leaves them searching for pressure points. The litigation surrounding detainee labor is best understood as one of those pressure points.
The Thing Almost Nobody Cared About
For most Americans, immigration detention is something that happens somewhere else. They know detention facilities exist. They know people are held there. Very few have ever wondered who cleans the floors, washes the laundry, wipes the tables, or serves the meals. That is not a criticism. It is simply reality.
Every institution develops chores. Armies have them. Colleges have them. Hospitals have them. Prisons have them. Immigration detention facilities have them. For decades, detainees participating in those housekeeping functions attracted almost no public attention because the arrangement appeared entirely unremarkable. Facilities needed cleaning. Detainees volunteered to help. Congress authorized a modest allowance. Life went on.
Then somebody decided to call it employment.
Everything that follows stems from that decision.
The People Holding the Mop
Before going any further, it is worth remembering that the people participating in these programs are not legal abstractions. They are detainees. Some will ultimately be deported. Some will win asylum. Some will be released. Some will remain in proceedings for months. Most spend those months doing what detainees have always done: waiting.
Critics frequently describe immigration detention as indistinguishable from prison because detention facilities contain bars, fences, guards, uniforms, recreation yards, housing units, and institutional rules. In a practical sense, they are not entirely wrong. Any facility designed to prevent people from leaving necessarily shares certain physical characteristics with a correctional institution.
But that observation only gets us halfway to understanding detention.
The average detainee is not participating in a philosophical debate about civil versus criminal confinement. He is trying to get through another day. He calls home. He speaks with counsel. He waits for hearings. He watches television. He exercises. He plays cards. Above all else, he waits.
This is one reason the Voluntary Work Program has persisted for decades. The money matters. Commissary purchases matter. Coffee matters. Phone time matters. But the opportunity to do something often matters just as much. A housing unit can become a very small world when every day looks exactly like the one before it. Whatever activists, judges, and contractors think about the program, many detainees understand it in far simpler terms: it breaks up the day.
How We Got Here
The modern campaign against detainee labor did not begin in Tacoma, nor did it begin with Washington’s minimum wage law. By the time Washington entered the fight, the underlying theory had already spent years moving through federal courts under a variety of different labels.
In Colorado, detainees challenged sanitation requirements and voluntary work assignments at GEO’s Aurora facility. In California, detainees pursued labor and trafficking-related claims against CoreCivic. In Georgia and elsewhere, plaintiffs advanced different theories against different operators, but the pattern was remarkably consistent. Some alleged forced labor. Some alleged unjust enrichment. Some challenged compensation levels. Others attacked the work programs themselves.
At first glance, these cases appear unrelated. Different plaintiffs. Different facilities. Different legal theories. Different states.
Look a little closer, however, and the common denominator becomes difficult to miss.
The target was almost always the same.
Not immigration detention generally.
Not immigration enforcement broadly.
The work program.
Case after case asked judges to revisit a practice that had existed quietly for decades. The theories changed depending on the jurisdiction and the available statutes, but the underlying challenge remained remarkably stable: should detainees participating in institutional housekeeping programs be treated as something closer to ordinary employees?
That question would eventually collide with the longest-running and potentially most consequential of the cases, the litigation surrounding GEO’s Tacoma facility. By then, however, the battlefield had already been prepared. The argument was no longer about a mop, a laundry cart, or a one-dollar allowance. It had evolved into a broader dispute over the legal status of detainee labor itself.
The Statutory Blueprint (The 1950 Reality)
To fully understand the dishonesty anchoring the modern outrage, you have to look at the math. The program that activists today decry as an “exploitative corporate invention” actually originated more than half a century before ICE even existed.
The statutory baseline was laid down by Congress in 1950, codified at 8 U.S.C. § 1555(d). Congress explicitly authorized the old Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) to use federal appropriations to pay monetary allowances to non-citizens held in custody for work they performed while detained.
The “$1.00 per day” rate was not cooked up by a private prison executive looking to maximize shareholder value. It was set by federal lawmakers.
- 1950: The original statute did not lock in a permanent wage, but Congress tied the allowance to a $1.00 per day rate through accompanying appropriations bills. In mid-century money, that dollar carried the purchasing power of roughly $10 today.
- 1978: Congress passed subsequent funding legislation that explicitly capped the allowance, declaring it could “not be in excess of $1 per day.” This was the last time the legislature formally updated the funding structure.
- 1982: Recognizing that inflation had eroded the stipend, the INS formally requested that Congress raise the daily rate to $4.00. Congress flatly declined to update it.
Congress therefore had multiple opportunities to revisit the compensation structure and repeatedly chose not to do so.
Whether that decision was wise is a policy question.
Whether it was intentional is not.
In fact, one of the peculiar features of the current litigation is that it effectively seeks to impose liability on private contractors for faithfully implementing a compensation framework Congress itself created and repeatedly preserved. The outrage may be modern. The underlying structure is not.
When the INS was abolished in 2003 and swallowed by the Department of Homeland Security, ICE simply inherited the historical framework. The agency formalized the guidelines into its Performance-Based National Detention Standards (PBNDS)—capping voluntary participation at 8 hours a day and 40 hours a week—while maintaining the exact baseline pay rate Congress locked in place during the Carter administration.
The modern litigation often treats the $1-per-day allowance as a private-sector innovation designed to benefit GEO or CoreCivic. The historical record suggests something else entirely. Whatever one thinks of the allowance today, and lack of inflation adjustment to reflect the cost of living in the 2020s, it is ultimately a creature of congressional action and congressional inaction stretching back more than seven decades.
The Category Transformation
The entire litigation campaign depends upon a single transformation. Detainees become employees. Allowances become wages. Housekeeping becomes labor. Institutional participation becomes market employment.
Without that transformation, much of the litigation collapses. With it, labor law suddenly arrives.
This is where the argument becomes less persuasive. Civil immigration detainees are many things. They are respondents. They are asylum applicants. They are removable aliens. They are lawful permanent residents facing proceedings because of criminal convictions. They are visa overstays. They are individuals awaiting decisions from the immigration system.
What they are not is easily classified as employees.
Employment law generally assumes participation in a labor market. Detainees do not participate in a labor market. They cannot seek competing employers. They cannot negotiate compensation. They cannot freely leave and accept better opportunities elsewhere. Whatever the Voluntary Work Program may be, it bears only a passing resemblance to the ordinary employment relationships state labor laws were designed to regulate.
The Prison Problem Critics Don’t Want to Discuss
There is another awkward question lurking beneath all of this litigation.
If the $1-per-day allowance is inherently unconscionable, where is the comparable outrage directed at the federal prison system?
The same activists, academics, and politicians who routinely describe immigration detention work programs as exploitative rarely devote comparable attention to the compensation structures found throughout the Bureau of Prisons and state correctional systems.
That omission is difficult to explain.
Federal inmates working ordinary institutional jobs routinely earn only pennies per hour. Those who obtain the coveted positions offered through UNICOR—Federal Prison Industries—typically earn between $0.23 and $1.15 per hour. Even the highest-paying prison-industries jobs often compensate incarcerated workers at rates that would trigger immediate outrage if translated into ordinary market employment. Yet there is remarkably little public demand that federal prisons begin paying inmates the prevailing wage for manufacturing furniture, producing equipment, or performing industrial labor. The Bureau of Prisons itself identifies $0.23 to $1.15 per hour as the typical UNICOR pay range.
The comparison is not perfect. Immigration detainees are civil detainees rather than convicted prisoners.
But that distinction cuts both ways.
Critics of the Voluntary Work Program often borrow their rhetoric from labor law while simultaneously ignoring the reality that custodial institutions have never been treated as ordinary labor markets. The federal government has long recognized a separate category of institutional work performed inside confinement. It applies that principle to federal penitentiaries. States apply it to their prison systems. Courts have repeatedly recognized it in various custodial settings.
The question therefore is not whether detainees should receive larger allowances. Reasonable people can disagree about that.
The question is why immigration detention alone is being singled out for treatment radically different from every other custodial environment in the country.
If a federal inmate manufacturing products through UNICOR is not viewed as a minimum-wage employee despite earning as little as twenty-three cents per hour, it becomes more difficult to explain why a civil detainee wiping tables in a detention-center dining hall should suddenly be treated as one.
That inconsistency does not prove the current detainee allowance is fair.
It does suggest, however, that the current controversy is driven by something larger than compensation alone.
Reality is a Problem Hard to Ignore
This is where the story becomes awkward.
Many detainees lack employment authorization. That fact creates a practical problem for advocates of the minimum-wage theory. If detainees must be treated as ordinary employees, what follows? Should every participant be vetted for employment authorization? Should a private contractor be forced to run a Form I-9 verification on a civil detainee, knowing it will trigger an immediate federal violation? The current litigation rarely lingers on these questions. Yet they are unavoidable.
The issue becomes even more complicated when one considers why detainees voluntarily participate in these programs in the first place. Activists often discuss detainee labor as though it exists solely for the benefit of the contractor. Reality is considerably more mundane.
Detention is, above all else, an exercise in waiting. For many participants, the program offers structure, movement, interaction, and a modest ability to earn money for commissary purchases. Coffee. Snacks. Toiletries. Writing supplies. Phone time. Small comforts that make confinement more bearable.
Nobody is suggesting that a detainee leaves custody wealthy because he pushed a mop or folded laundry. He does not.
The more practical question is what replaces the program if the litigation succeeds. History suggests that when governments dramatically increase the cost of a service, institutions do not always expand it. Sometimes they eliminate it.
If states ultimately succeed in converting a congressional allowance into a state-mandated wage obligation, the most likely outcome is not a richer detainee population. It is a significantly smaller work program, if any program survives at all.
Because every legal rule eventually collides with reality.
The contradiction should feel familiar to anyone who follows state-level immigration policy. It is the exact same sleight of hand we see with driver’s licenses. Almost two dozen states have passed laws granting driver’s licenses to illegal aliens under the pious public narrative of “making our roads safer.” They claim it ensures drivers are tested, vetted, and insured.
Look past the press release and look at the functional reality. The state is actively issuing a government document that facilitates an alien’s ability to drive to and from the very jobs he is federally unauthorized to hold. The state legalizes the commute to an illegal destination.
Now those same jurisdictions want to bring that circular logic inside the detention-center walls. They want to mandate standard market-employment protections, complete with state minimum wages, payroll compliance, and employment-law remedies, for a population that the federal government has explicitly barred from entering the labor market.
In effect, they are demanding that a private contractor build a functioning payroll system on top of a legal impossibility.
The States’ Contradiction
Here is the contradiction at the center of the story.
Many of the jurisdictions pursuing these labor theories oppose detention facilities entirely.
They oppose expanded detention capacity.
They oppose private detention operators.
They oppose contract renewals.
They oppose new construction.
They oppose facility expansion.
At the same time, those same jurisdictions regularly object when detainees are transferred to facilities elsewhere.
Distance from family becomes a concern. (Ed. I’m actually okay with this, because they’re often further from the family they left back home, and once deported, will be further from the family they recklessly started here. Besides, isn’t absence supposed to make the heart grow fonder? Alternatively, if you love someone, aren’t you supposed to set them free to see if they return though doing so here without a waiver and/or illegally is a felony.)
They want the facility gone, but they want the political capital of complaining about its conditions while it’s here. They want “immigrants—their words not mine—free to go about their daily lives of displacing American workers, suppressing wages, and spending money not in detention center commissaries, but in neighborhood bodegas and grocers. And if some eggs are cracked due to criminality while the omelet is made, so be it. After all, diversity is our strength even when forced, and families belong together, but really, only those that don’t belong here.
Those states and localities object to the existence of a private facility, but the moment ICE threatens to load those detainees into white transport vans and transfer them to a federally controlled facility in Texas or New Mexico, the state screams that immigrant families are being structurally isolated.
The answer is as obvious as if it were written by Dr. Seuss himself:
“Not here.
Not there.
“Blue” states do not want “immigrants” detained anywhere.
Not in private facilities.
Not in expanded facilities.
All immigration detention facilities, they claim, are racial pillories.”
They have created a political continuum where keeping detainees locally is an emergency, transferring them away is a tragedy, and maintaining the infrastructure required to house them safely is a corporate conspiracy.
The policy begins to resemble a geometry problem with no solution. Look no further than the rolling circus surrounding Delaney Hall in Newark, New Jersey.
New Jersey politicians spent years self-congratulating over a state-level ban designed to permanently drive private detention contractors out of the Garden State. Then, the federal government bypassed the state entirely, awarding a massive 15-year contract to The GEO Group to reopen Delaney Hall as the largest ICE hub on the East Coast.
The result has been a masterclass in structural hypocrisy.
The moment the facility reopened, the very same state officials who demanded its abolition pivoted instantly to performative outrage over its operational conditions. Activists organized daily protests, progressive lawmakers launched high-profile oversight tours, and New Jersey Attorney General Jennifer Davenport launched an aggressive civil rights probe into the facility following reports of medical emergencies and data-tracking disputes.
State health inspectors even went so far as to sue GEO Group in state court, loudly complaining they were barred from inspecting medical units and sleeping quarters. They cited public health threats, warning about unwashed staff hands, poorly ventilated common areas, and potato salad stored at a lukewarm 81 degrees.
Yet, step back and look at the broader landscape.
For all the curated outrage regarding its food storage and medical wait times, the infrastructure at Delaney Hall still operates under stringent federal oversight and a 24-hour medical network that routinely exceeds the baseline conditions found in New Jersey’s standard local municipal jails and public holding facilities. The state’s public county lockups—the very institutions these politicians implicitly prefer as an alternative to corporate operators—frequently operate with far less operational transparency, fragmented medical staffing, and zero institutional accountability to a federal detention standard.
What the States Really Want
The real story is not wages.
The real story is leverage.
States cannot abolish ICE detention. They cannot eliminate federal detention authority. They cannot terminate federal contracts. What they can do is increase costs, complicate operations, and impose friction.
The work-program litigation represents one of the few places where some states have discovered leverage over a system they otherwise cannot control. That does not necessarily make them wrong. It does, however, explain why the fight keeps returning to a one-dollar stipend.
The stipend is not the objective.
The detention system is.
It is a strategy of regulatory exhaustion. When a sovereign entity cannot legally prohibit an activity under the Constitution, its most effective alternative is to make that activity economically ruinous to execute.
The strategy treats the private contractor not as a federal partner, but as an ordinary commercial target. If a state can force a corporation like GEO Group or CoreCivic to pay a state-mandated $16 or $17 hourly wage to thousands of detainees who are merely washing their own laundry or scrubbing their own facility floors, the fiscal architecture of immigration detention changes overnight.
The margins vanish. The overhead skyrockets. Corporate boards are forced to consider whether a federal contract remains worth the legal exposure.
That is what makes these cases so significant.
It is asymmetric legal warfare under the guise of labor advocacy. The practical effect is not that detainees leave custody with meaningful savings accounts. The practical effect is that detention becomes significantly more expensive to operate, placing pressure on overall detention capacity regardless of whether that outcome was the original objective. In that sense, the litigation functions as a form of economic leverage against a detention system that many of its advocates have been unable to eliminate through ordinary political channels.
If they win, they establish a precedent that allows any local jurisdiction to function as a regulatory gatekeeper for federal operations. If they lose, they simply move to the next point of friction.
For now, however, the mop bucket remains the primary weapon.
This is why the detainee labor cases matter far beyond the dollar amount at issue.
The stipend is not really the story. The mop bucket is not really the story. The laundry cart is not really the story.
These are merely pressure points.
The real dispute concerns who gets to shape the practical realities of immigration detention.
Congress?
ICE?
Federal contractors operating under federal authority?
Or states that lack direct authority over the detention system itself?
The wage litigation is simply where that broader conflict finally surfaced.
The Cases Converge
For years, the detainee-labor litigation existed as a collection of regional disputes, each advancing slightly different theories against slightly different operators. Some plaintiffs focused on alleged forced labor. Others pursued unjust-enrichment claims. Others attacked compensation levels through state wage-and-hour statutes. The legal theories varied, but the facilities, contractors, and underlying work programs remained remarkably similar.
In Colorado, detainees at GEO’s Aurora facility challenged both mandatory sanitation requirements and the Voluntary Work Program itself. In California, detainees pursued labor and trafficking-related claims against CoreCivic. In Georgia, litigation emerged over work practices at the Stewart Detention Center. In Washington, both detainees and the State itself eventually targeted GEO’s Tacoma facility, arguing that participants in the Voluntary Work Program should be treated as employees entitled to the protections of Washington’s Minimum Wage Act.
For a time, these matters appeared to be isolated disputes. Different courts wrestled with different causes of action and different factual records. Some cases focused on coercion. Others focused on compensation. Some involved federal statutes. Others relied primarily upon state law.
Yet all of them gradually circled the same unresolved question:
What exactly is detainee labor?
Is it employment?
Is it participation in a custodial housekeeping program?
Or is it a legal category unto itself?
That question ultimately came into focus in the litigation surrounding GEO’s Northwest ICE Processing Center in Tacoma. Unlike many of the earlier cases, the Washington litigation squarely presented the issue of whether civil immigration detainees participating in a federally authorized work program could be treated as employees for purposes of state minimum-wage law.
The resulting decisions produced a sharp divide. Supporters viewed the litigation as a straightforward effort to extend workplace protections to a vulnerable population. Critics viewed it as an attempt to graft state labor law onto a federal detention framework that Congress had never designed to function as an employment relationship.
The disagreement is no longer academic.
After years of litigation, judgments, appeals, and dissents, the Washington cases have transformed a once-obscure housekeeping program into a national test case. The dispute no longer concerns a single detention facility in Tacoma. It concerns whether states can redefine the legal status of detainee labor and, in doing so, materially alter the operation of federal detention facilities throughout the country.
That is why the cases now matter far beyond the individual plaintiffs or the individual facilities involved.
Colorado helped frame the debate.
California expanded it.
Georgia contributed to it.
Washington brought the question to a head.
And now the Supreme Court may decide it.
Enter the Supreme Court
By now the litigation has spread across multiple jurisdictions, involving GEO, CoreCivic, and overlapping questions about preemption, contractor status, detainee labor, and federal authority. The details vary. The structural question does not. Can states do indirectly what they cannot do directly? That is the question increasingly working its way toward the Supreme Court in the pending case The GEO Group, Inc. v. Nwauzor. After the Ninth Circuit stuck GEO with a $23 million judgment for failing to pay Washington State’s minimum wage at the Tacoma facility, the contractor appealed to the high court, claiming derivative federal immunity. The corporate defense just received its biggest shield yet. In late September 2026, the Trump administration’s Department of Justice officially filed a brief backing GEO Group at the Supreme Court. The federal government argued directly that allowing states to weaponize their local wage laws would disrupt uniform federal immigration enforcement and effectively give states veto power over federal operations. History, however, shows us that this is not a new legal front. The Supremacy Clause has spent over two centuries systematically crushing localized efforts to throw sand in the gears of federal operations. The courts have repeatedly made it clear that a state cannot use a private intermediary as a proxy target to hamstring the federal government. The high court has shut down these exact state-level interference efforts across completely unrelated domains:
- The Nuclear Proxy Fight (United States v. Washington, 2022): Just a few years ago, Washington State tried a nearly identical maneuver at the federal Hanford nuclear cleanup site. The state passed a workers’ compensation law that selectively increased financial liabilities exclusively for federal contractors. A unanimous Supreme Court struck it down, ruling that under the doctrine of intergovernmental immunity, a state cannot facially discriminate against the federal government or those with whom it deals by artificially driving up their operational costs.
- The Base Construction Standoff (Leslie Miller, Inc. v. Arkansas, 1956): When Arkansas tried to force a private contractor building an Air Force base to submit to state licensing boards and regulations, the Supreme Court stepped in. The Court ruled that because the federal government had already vetted and selected the contractor under federal standards, the state could not impose an additional regulatory checkpoint to interfere with a federal project.
- The Original Blueprint (McCulloch v. Maryland, 1819): This entire legal lineage traces back to Chief Justice John Marshall’s foundational ruling. When Maryland attempted to tax the Second Bank of the United States out of existence, the Court didn’t just protect the bank; it established the core axiom that the states have no power, by taxation or otherwise, to retard, impede, burden, or in any manner control the operations of the constitutional laws enacted by Congress.
The playbook hasn’t changed since 1819. Washington and New Jersey are simply swapping out the bank tax for a mop bucket.
Concluding with the Real Question
The public argument is about a dollar.
The legal argument is about wages.
The political argument is about detention.
But the actual question is much older.
Who decides how federal institutions operate?
Congress?
Federal agencies?
States?
Or courts?
The mop bucket just happens to be where that question finally surfaced.
My prediction? The activist jurisdictions driving this litigation are going to lose.
Bigly.
The legal strategy behind the mop-bucket campaign relies on a highly calculated emotional appeal, but it suffers from a fatal structural flaw: it mistakes political leverage for constitutional authority.
When the Supreme Court finally hands down its ruling, the decision will not be a granular debate over whether scrubbing a toilet qualifies as market labor. It will be a blunt reassertion of federal supremacy. The high court is not going to allow a fragmented patchwork of progressive state legislatures to dictate the operational overhead of federal immigration enforcement. To do so would invite administrative chaos, effectively giving any state the power to nullify federal operations simply by raising the local regulatory price tag.
The states have overplayed their hand. By trying to transform civil detainees into ordinary employees, they have run headfirst into a wall of irreconcilable contradictions—from the absurdity of the I-9 verification loop to the blatant operational double standards exposed at facilities like Delaney Hall. They have tried to weaponize local labor laws to force a de facto abolition of a system they cannot legally dismantle.
When the dust settles, the corporate operators will keep their federal shields, the one-dollar stipend will likely remain intact, and the states will be left holding an empty bucket.
The jurisdictions driving this litigation likely believe they have found a clever backdoor to constrain immigration detention. Instead, they may have charted a path toward a Supreme Court decision that further narrows their ability to interfere with federal operations. More importantly, even assuming they prevail and detainees are ultimately classified as employees entitled to state-mandated wages, the most probable outcome is not a dramatic improvement in detainee compensation. It is the termination of the program itself.
No rational operator is going to pay prevailing wages for detainees to mop floors, collect laundry, wipe tables, or perform other housekeeping functions when it can simply discontinue the program altogether.
There is, of course, another option.
If the states genuinely believe the current allowance is unfair, Congress remains free to change it tomorrow. Congress created the framework. Congress preserved the framework. Congress rejected requests to increase the allowance. Congress can just as easily revisit the issue and authorize a higher amount. That approach would at least confront the actual source of the compensation structure rather than attempting to reclassify detainees as employees and impose state labor laws on a federal detention system.
Curiously, that is not the path these jurisdictions have chosen.
Instead of petitioning Congress to increase the federally authorized allowance, they have asked courts to transform a decades-old custodial program into an employment relationship. That distinction matters because one approach seeks to modify the federal policy that created the program, while the other seeks to use state law to reshape how a federal program operates.
If the real concern is compensation, Congress is the obvious target.
If the target is something else, the current litigation makes considerably more sense.
Nor are companies like GEO, CoreCivic, LaSalle, or MTC going anywhere. As long as Congress maintains statutes requiring the detention of certain categories of aliens, and as long as there is an agency charged with enforcing those statutes, whether it is called ICE or something else, there will be detention facilities. And where there are detention facilities, there will be private-sector companies ready, willing, and able to build them, operate them, manage them, staff them, transport detainees to and from them, or otherwise profit from their existence.
The real question, therefore, is not whether detention will continue.
It will.
The question is whether states can use labor law to dictate how federal detention operates.
In the end, the real losers won’t be the states who aided and, in some cases, brought suits. It’s going to be the aliens who’ve for roughly seven decades, quietly pushed a broom or mopped a floor grateful to earn money—however little—for a time before most were ultimately deported, to make detention just a little more tolerable.