cross-posted from: https://infosec.pub/post/47730357

The Thirteenth Amendment prohibits slavery, except “as a punishment for crime.” But people in immigration detention haven’t been convicted of anything—and are still being forced to work for nothing.

For the past several weeks, hundreds of detainees at Delaney Hall, an immigration detention center in Newark, New Jersey, have been on a labor and hunger strike. Participants in the strike are refusing to perform their work assignments or eat meals in protest of what they describe, in a series of handwritten letters smuggled out of the facility, as “unlawful and forced detention” and “inhumane treatment” that violates their constitutional rights. Among the myriad “injustices and irregularities” named in the letters are rotten food riddled with worms; persistent “unresolved issues” with bathrooms in “terrible and inhumane” condition; and detainees being forced to work for practically pennies or, more often, for no pay at all.

Delaney Hall was the first immigration detention center to open during President Donald Trump’s second term in office. And like almost all immigration detention facilities, Delaney is owned and operated by a private prison corporation. GEO Group, a company valued at approximately $3.3 billion, signed a 15-year contract with Immigration and Customs Enforcement in February 2025, providing ICE with the facility and “support services” like security, maintenance, and food services, in exchange for over $60 million annually. 

But it is the detainees—not GEO Group—who actually do that work.

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Forcing immigrant detainees to work for their captors isn’t just exploitative. It’s unconstitutional. The Thirteenth Amendment explicitly prohibits slavery and indentured servitude, except “as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.” But immigration detention is a form of civil confinement. People held in detention centers are simply waiting—behind bars—for the resolution of their immigration cases. This is punitive in practice, but not in law, as they are incarcerated, but not in prison. Only 12 percent of the people who have been detained at Delaney Hall since it opened have ever been convicted of anything.

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The strike at Delaney Hall is not an isolated incident. In recent weeks, hundreds of other immigration detainees across the country have participated in similar strikes. But Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin told reporters last week that “only a handful” of detainees at Delaney were refusing to eat, and it was because they wanted “ethnic” food. 

In their letters, the migrants write that GEO Group is failing to “meet the basic conditions necessary to protect our health and our lives.” And as one recently-released Delaney detainee quipped, in an interview with The Guardian last week, “If we are going to be detained for months so this company can profit, they should at least provide a better service.”

Since reentering the White House, Trump has waged an aggressive campaign to detain and deport people of color—building more detention infrastructure, arresting more people, and releasing fewer. And as the immigration detention population grows, so too does the nation’s Thirteenth Amendment crisis.