In February, driven by Trump’s dystopian deportation regime, two of ICE’s largest contractors reported record revenues for 2025. GEO Group and CoreCivic, which together own and operate dozens of detention centers, each earned more than $2 billion in revenue.
Meanwhile detained immigrants who labor within the very facilities where they are held—cleaning and maintaining units, cooking meals, providing hygiene services, and assisting disabled residents—are paid as little as $1 per day. Increasingly they are organizing against this exploitation; when they do, their for-profit captors respond swiftly and sometimes violently.
In 2022, when men detained at the Mesa Verde ICE Processing Center in Bakersfield, California, launched a labor strike, GEO placed their leaders in solitary confinement. The organizers later declared a hunger strike, which ended after its leaders were violently extracted to Texas, where they were threatened with court-authorized force-feeding.
A legal team I led at University of California, Irvine, working in collaboration with the California Collaborative for Immigrant Justice (CCIJ), argued that these men’s right to protest was covered under the National Labor Relations Act. We asserted that GEO had engaged in a campaign of retaliation in violation of the statute. These claims saw some initial success, but the leadership of the National Labor Relations Board changed in February 2025 and dropped a Biden-era complaint formally accusing GEO of retaliation.
As the Trump administration continues it violent campaign to detain and deport record numbers of immigrants, I spoke with Pedro Figueroa, a thirty-seven-year-old resident of Santa Ana, California, about his organizing at Mesa Verde. Figueroa, a leader of the groundbreaking strikes, has endured retaliation and years of confinement. He emphasizes that, despite significant legal challenges, organizing efforts among both released and detained immigrant workers continue.
Our conversation and its takeaways feel more urgent than ever, as Trump’s expansion of detention operations and immigration policing further intensifies the exploitation of detained immigrants.
—Sameer Ashar
Sameer Ashar: What kind of work did you do at Mesa Verde as part of the Voluntary Work Program?
Pedro Figueroa: It was janitorial work—cleaning and scrubbing the restrooms, mopping, taking out the trash. We also ended up doing tasks that felt like GEO’s responsibility, like examining our food for contamination. That really isn’t our job.
SA: Who supervised your work?
PF: GEO staff did.
SA: Were they armed?
PF: I think at one point they had pepper spray. They always carried batons., I suspect that it was only lieutenants or certain staff who were allowed to carry pepper spray and tasers, but I’m not entirely sure.
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SA: Before we get to the strike, why do you think people detained by ICE in these centers want to do these jobs, even though they’re paid a dollar a day?
PF: Partly to clean your own environment. Also, everything is really expensive. Some people don’t have families who can provide for them financially. That dollar a day becomes essential for their survival.
We’re being basically extorted by the phone companies and commissary vendors. The commissary in immigration detention charges two to three times what the same items cost in state prison, and phone and video calls are also much more expensive.
We kind of try to ignore the wage, because you’re essentially forced to work. The staff also treat the people who work slightly better. Sometimes people just want to be treated with respect by people who have power over them.
SA: How has your experience making a dollar a day in detention influenced how you see work and working conditions outside?
PF: Mentally, it’s a battle I still fight every day. Certain sights, sounds, and experiences trigger the same questions about what’s right and what’s wrong. Sometimes I mentally check out just to get through the day. When you’re working in a warehouse, doing forklift work and nonstop packaging, it can feel like trafficking. The bosses walking around, the constant pressure, no breaks—it can feel like forced labor.
SA: Let’s go back to your experience inside the facility—were there any moments that stood out as turning points?
PF: One day, I was mopping the floor, and one of the guards who was watching me situated himself in a security-camera blind spot. He kicked his feet up with chips and a drink while I worked and told me in Spanish, “Easy money.” That’s when it hit me—GEO was profiting off my labor while I got nothing. I realized then that I wanted to go on a labor strike.
But my desire to make things better started before that. At another facility in Bakersfield, the warden walked in with a few staff and started talking to about twelve of us. Out of those twelve, only four of us spoke English. Everyone else had no idea what the staff was saying. I called it to their attention and asked if I could translate. That’s where it all began.
Every single day, I encountered something new that wasn’t right. Why are there no educational services? Why are the lights kept on in the pod, depriving people of sleep? What’s the point of these things, other than compromising our well-being?
As time passed, I kept speaking up. And then I realized: this is advocacy, what I’m doing. I started learning about my rights, so I could understand what I was doing.
SA: When did you start talking to other people about what you were learning?
PF: Whenever I spoke to attorneys or paralegals, I asked questions and learned a lot. For example, one piece of advice was: Something wrong? Document it. Put all the details on paper. Whatever I learned from these phone calls, I always shared with others.
Some other guys and I often went around inviting people to share their concerns with us. We were willing to help. We were essentially saying: What you’re going through matters. There should be a complaint, and GEO should be professional enough to admit when they messed up. That’s how the organizing began for me—one complaint after another, one issue brought to GEO’s attention after another.
That’s when things started escalating—they seemed to have a vendetta against us. Retaliation became harsher. It felt like the GEO staff came to work just to press people’s buttons.
SA: Were you fearful when your organizing started escalating?
PF: Of course I was fearful. The officers were threatening us with consequences in our immigration cases: The judge will find out how difficult you’re being. But I had to stay mentally strong and remind myself that I was there for a bigger purpose—understanding, learning, and getting educated. For others, I tried to bring some sort of comfort because that was all I could do.
SA: How did authorities react to the strike?
PF: When we said we were no longer going to work because of the conditions, everything changed. They responded with classic prison tactics. GEO staff aimed to instill fear by removing people from the general population and putting them in solitary confinement.
I think I was targeted because I was one of the individuals who spoke out the most. Was it easy? No. But I had already decided that I wasn’t going to put up with any more injustice. Solitary confinement started affecting my mental health. I know they use it for that reason and to separate out people they see as influencing others.
In their eyes, we’re doing something bad—but we’re not. You call it influence; I call it education. They use solitary to remove people who are “contaminating” the rest of the population or to isolate those who agree but don’t yet have the courage to speak up. Essentially, it’s a way to dismember a group that’s opposing them.
SA: You were one of the organizers put in solitary, and you’ve mentioned that you still feel the effects of that experience. What are some of the things you still experience because of it?
PF: I’m always thinking about that experience. It haunts me.
Overall, the whole journey has impacted me deeply. I am constantly battling something that relates to my confinement—whether it’s my appetite or my sleep at night. For the past two weeks, for example, I’ve been suffering from insomnia. I’m not able to sleep, or I sleep uncomfortably.
SA: You ultimately went on hunger strike while in solitary, and you were one of four people who were pulled out of Mesa Verde and flown to El Paso, where you were threatened with force-feeding. Why do you think ICE and GEO reacted to the hunger strike in the way that they did?
PF: The hunger strike drew a lot of attention. You have a group of people willing to sacrifice their lives. And for what reason? There’s definitely a reason. People don’t do things like that just for fun—Hey, I’m going to starve myself for twenty-one days.
SA: How would you describe the removal to Texas?
PF: I felt like I was treated like an animal. Even in prison, I was never treated that way. I kept asking: What’s the reason? Because I’m on a hunger strike? I’m not harming them. I’m not doing anything to them.
But there is a reason—a desperate reason. They refuse to obey their own policies. This is the way they react to people who push them to follow their rules. And they reacted very violently because there was media coverage.
SA: People in California’s GEO facilities continue to go on labor strikes and hunger strikes. How do you think that idea is being passed between detained people?
PF: Take my facility, for example. There were people who didn’t have the courage to strike with us. But when they saw individuals speaking up and standing their ground—for their own dignity and the dignity of others—and then saw these people leave, that was inspiring, uplifting, and it gave them courage.
Here’s my theory: those who are left behind eventually start seeing everything. They begin to realize: These people were right—this is the only way. Then they start becoming leaders. It’s a chain that I feel will continue as long as these places are open.
SA: I was part of the work that CCIJ did to file an unfair labor practice charge on your behalf in December 2022. The NLRB issued a complaint against GEO because of the retaliation against you on January 6, 2025. Unfortunately, the Trump administration withdrew that complaint on February 18, 2025. Amidst all of that, how did the involvement of the NLRB affect you?
PF: It’s unfortunate that the NLRB pulled back, but it felt good to have a federal agency recognize something that another federal agency refused to recognize. It made me pause for a second and think: Maybe there is a brighter side to things. Maybe people are willing to speak up and hold people accountable.
Unfortunately, it’s still an ongoing battle, and the NLRB’s withdrawal leaves me questioning things. I feel like that was a corrupted move, honestly. Who does that? They’ve gone through an investigation for two years—more than enough time to make a concrete decision and say, there is something wrong here—and then just withdrew it. At the end of the day, we know they acknowledged it, and we continue forward to see how we can still hold them accountable.
SA: How do you think lawyers and others in the outside world should support incarcerated workers?
PF: All kinds of support are valuable because you never know who needs what. It could be a simple phone call, letting people know: Hey, everything’s going to be OK, we’re here for you. There were protests that took place—and still take place—outside the facilities.
A lot of staff often laughed at the protests. But I was on the inside, and I could see those individuals who didn’t yet have the courage. They had a look on their faces: These people really do care. I think all support is good support, but the best support is educating us and letting us know what our rights are.
SA: I’m sure you know that CCIJ describes itself as an abolitionist legal organization. They want to support people in detention centers and eliminate all immigration detention in California. How do you think about the idea of abolition?
PF: Time is so precious. The reasoning they use to rip that time away from us is not valid. I spent twenty-one months in there—twenty-one months I’m never going to get back. That time were super harsh. I was made to feel inhuman day in and day out.
A lot of people commit suicide due to depression and trauma. Tens of thousands of people are being held, and nobody knows what detention will do to them later in life. Abolishing these places completely would save a lot of people.
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