In the early mornings at the Northwest Immigration and Customs Enforcement Processing Center (NWIPC) in Tacoma, Washington, a detained immigrant might wake to begin a shift scrubbing floors or preparing food in the facility kitchen. For their labor, they receive one dollar a day. This meager payment, set by the private prison contractor GEO Group (GEO), stands in stark contrast to Washington State’s minimum wage, which was $11-per-hour in 2017 and has only grown since. The contradiction raised a critical question: when detained immigrants work, are they workers under state law — or merely detainees under federal control? Nwauzor v. GEO Group, Inc. arose out of this precise tension. But Nwauzor is not just a case about wage law, it’s a case about power: between states and the federal government, between private corporations and vulnerable people, and between movements fighting to dismantle systems of incarceration.
Nwauzor was brought by detained immigrants at NWIPC in Tacoma, Washington against GEO, a private prison contractor that operates NWIPC. GEO manages NWIPC under a contract with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). At NWIPC, detained immigrants are allowed to participate in a voluntary work program (VWP) in which they are paid $1 per day, the minimum compensation mandated by ICE. Washington’s Minimum Wage Act (MWA), however, requires employers to pay significantly more — $11 per hour in 2017, adjusted each year and currently $16.66 per hour. Importantly, GEO’s contract with ICE requires GEO to comply with “all applicable federal, state, and local laws and standards.” There is no exception carved out for state minimum wage laws, and the contract further specifies that, in the event of a conflict between federal and state standards, “the most stringent standard shall apply.” Through the VWP, GEO employed more than a hundred detainees in various roles, including meal preparation tasks, laundry services, and janitorial duties. GEO estimated that, without the VWP, it would need to hire “approximately 85 additional full-time outside employees” to maintain operations.
In 2017, a class of detainees and Washington State each sued GEO in the United States District Court for the Western District of Washington for violations of the MWA. The court certified the detainee class and consolidated the cases. A jury ultimately awarded over $17 million in backpay to the class, as well as almost $6 million to the State of Washington for unjust enrichment. The court also issued an injunction prohibiting GEO from employing detainees without paying at least the minimum wage required by the MWA. In response to the injunction, GEO, with approval from ICE, chose to suspend the VWP instead of complying with the state minimum wage requirement. GEO appealed the verdicts of both cases to the Ninth Circuit, where the Court certified three questions to the Washington Supreme Court asking, inter alia, whether the MWA applied to the individuals detained at NWIPC. The Washington Supreme Court answered that, under state law, the detained individuals were employees and the MWA’s protections covered them and their work under the VWP.
The Ninth Circuit affirmed the district court’s judgment in favor of Nwauzor. Writing for the panel, Judge Fletcher held that (1) the MWA was not preempted by federal law, (2) applying the MWA to detained immigrants participating in the VWP did not violate the doctrine of intergovernmental immunity, and (3) GEO was not entitled to derivative sovereign immunity under the government contractor defense.
On the issue of preemption, the court explained that federal law preempts state law only when it is impossible to comply with both or when state law frustrates federal objectives. However, there is a presumption against preemption in areas of “historic police powers” — employment regulation being one of them. Judge Fletcher wrote that the presumption applies “even if the law ‘touch[es] on’ an area of significant federal presence . . . such as immigration.” The presumption against preemption is overcome by a “clear and manifest purpose of Congress.”
Under the “clear and manifest purpose” test, Judge Fletcher found that the MWA is not preempted. The court considered two federal statutes raised by GEO in support of preemption: a 1950 statute, 8 U.S.C. § 1555, allowing federal funds for compensating detained workers, and the Department of Justice Appropriation Authorization Act of 1979, limiting the reimbursement rate to $1 per day. The court found neither overcame the presumption against preemption. The former set no upper limit on pay and predated private detention, and the latter is no longer in effect and only limited federal reimbursement — not the actual amount paid to detainees.
Responding to Judge Bennett’s dissent, the majority acknowledged that requiring compliance with state minimum wage laws could lead GEO to request more funding from the federal government. But while Judge Bennett considered this an indicator that federal interests were impeded by the MWA, Judge Fletcher highlighted that this situation arises in other federal contracting contexts outside of immigration detention. There, cost increases from state wage regulations are not challenged. For example, contracts in national defense — which, like immigration, is an important federal function — are also subject to state wage laws. The court rejected the idea that immigration’s importance to federal interests exempts contractors from generally applicable wage regulations.
The court also rejected GEO’s arguments based on intergovernmental immunity and derivative sovereign immunity. It found that the MWA did not control or discriminate against the federal government’s operations. Moreover, the contract between GEO and ICE expressly required compliance with applicable state laws and gave GEO discretion over detainee pay. Since the challenged conduct — GEO’s decision on wages — was a discretionary act of the contractor rather than a directive from the government, it did not qualify for derivative sovereign immunity.
Nwauzor brings to the surface two tensions immigrants’ rights advocates have had to navigate and offers lessons on how to thread those narrow needles. The first tension is the difficulty in finding a desirable legal framework for federal supremacy over immigration, one that draws coherent and useful boundaries around what immigration even is. The second consists in the calculations necessary to determine when — and with whom — to leverage coalition-building as organizers place their legal strategies within a broader movement for change. As advocates continue to train their crosshairs on the inhumane treatment of migrants in detention, they may find it useful to appraise the ways in which the petitioners in Nwauzor approached these problems.
Federal supremacy can be a double-edged sword in immigrants’ rights litigation. The common wisdom is that immigration is treated exceptionally in a number of ways. Pertinently here, the federal government’s power over immigration regulation is in certain respects exclusive of the states. The unique strength of federal power over immigration has costs and benefits. On one hand, it plainly and categorically denies states from attempting their own enforcement in a highly complicated area of law — efforts that could worsen the situation for vulnerable immigrants. For example, federal supremacy supplied the rationale for a preliminary injunction denying Iowa the ability to criminalize people who reentered the country after deportation, which would perversely include people actually permitted to be in the United States. As Professor Kit Johnson puts it: “lawful presence is a different, more complex question” than merely inquiring into status to the point where DHS “has said it cannot or will not answer [it] for” sub-federal entities. Iowa’s misfire demonstrates the truth of this. But, on the other hand, entities like GEO are clearly attempting to wield federal preemption as part of a “thinly veiled defense of modern-day slavery.” And some have raised the theory that local sanctuary policies are in violation of federal supremacy. Although, not without competing voices countering with strong opposing arguments from a variety of political backgrounds.
Drawing a coherent and desirable line around the federal government’s exclusive power here is necessary, and Nwauzor offers some helpful indicia to advocates on what such a boundary may look like. Courts may be tempted to stretch the meaning of immigration and thus let the exceptional characteristics of immigration bleed into other areas of law. Indeed, this stretch may reach as far out as an officer’s Bivens liability to a U.S. citizen. But to have all state law that may incidentally touch noncitizens be preempted by federal immigration law would be an absurd resolution.
Instead, courts could follow the Nwauzor approach and scale their skepticism of preemption challenges based on their distance from admission and enforcement concerns. As some Nwauzor amici hinted, immigration enforcement and the regulation of admission seem like the heartland of the federal government’s power over immigration. But Nwauzor suggests a useful example of something outside the federal government’s power over immigration: neutrally aimed state employment laws and workplace regulations. Indeed, the Ninth Circuit is not the first circuit to take such an approach. The First Circuit did something similar in Capron v. Massachusetts Attorney General when it held that the Department of State’s au pair program did not preempt Massachusetts minimum wage law.
It is coherent to draw a distinction between laws like Washington’s minimum wage law and the kind of criminal enforcement law at issue in Iowa — preempting the latter but not the former — for two reasons. First, states can easily frame their employment protections neutrally with respect to immigration status but cannot criminalize noncitizens or their employers without reference to what particular immigration statuses they are criminalizing. Second, the federal government has rapidly and asymmetrically incorporated criminal enforcement norms, priorities, and processes into immigration law. Perhaps a consequence of blending immigration and criminal law is the displacement of states’ ability to criminalize noncitizens for their statuses. While difficult, developing a coherent and desirable way of articulating the borders between state and federal authority over immigrants’ lives is not impossible.
The second major takeaway from Nwauzor v. GEO is how it captures both the possibilities and limitations of coalition-driven litigation. As multiple movements challenge the exploitation of migrants in detention, Nwauzor offers a case study in how abolitionist, labor, and immigrants’ rights advocates can leverage aligned interests to win concrete victories. At the same time, it shows how these victories often depend on arguments that leave underlying economic structures intact, reflecting Professor Derrick Bell’s framework of interest convergence: that progress for marginalized groups tends to happen when it does not fundamentally disrupt the interests of dominant groups. Nwauzor ultimately highlights why legal wins, while meaningful, must be situated within broader strategies for systemic transformation.
Bell’s theory of “interest convergence” offers a framework for understanding when and why legal and political gains for marginalized groups occur. Bell argues that these gains often happen not because dominant groups undergo a moral reckoning, but because the changes align with their existing interests. His classic example is Brown v. Board of Education: desegregation advanced during the Cold War because it was in both Black and white Americans’ interests. It was less out of a shared commitment to racial justice, and more because the apartheid-like segregation in American schools harmed the United States’s international image. Desegregation was permitted because it did not fundamentally threaten imperialist and capitalist interests and may even have strengthened them.
Viewed through this lens, Nwauzor illustrates how strategic litigation can secure important remedies while still operating within — and ultimately accommodating — the prevailing economic structures. By focusing on GEO’s specific misconduct rather than situating detained labor within the broader context of an exploitative detention economy, the case and its supporting amici may have offered arguments that felt less threatening to dominant interests. This narrower framing possibly made it easier for those interests to support the litigation without confronting the structural harms of detention labor more broadly. For example, the National Employment Law Project (NELP) filed an amicus brief critiquing GEO’s subminimum wage practices not only as unjust to the workers themselves, but also as harmful to local economies and law-abiding businesses. This framing positioned GEO as a rogue actor undermining fair competition, rather than prompting scrutiny of the broader system that permits and profits from private detention.
Notwithstanding these potential limitations, Nwauzor nevertheless produced meaningful and material gains for the plaintiff class. Detained workers received both back pay and legal recognition of their status as employees entitled to basic labor protections. The decision also sent a signal to the private prison industry that wage theft would not be tolerated without consequence. And over the long term, wins like these that make detention labor more costly could also be a tool for movement organizers. As seen in other labor and abolitionist contexts, forcing unjust industries to internalize their own operational costs can destabilize them, opening possibilities for broader systemic change. Nwauzor is one example how litigation can be one tool that help realize this possibility.
Nwauzor also offers important lessons in coalition-building. It shows how movements rooted in different causes — immigrant justice, labor rights, economic fairness — can find temporary alignments, even if their ultimate visions may sometimes diverge. But deeper organizing will require grappling with harder questions. In immigration detention, for example, some detained individuals might prefer preserving work programs, even if exploitative, over losing them entirely. Similar tensions surface in prison abolition work, where closing facilities can lead to even harsher conditions elsewhere. Angela Davis’s framing of the problem as prison-industrial complex abolition is especially insightful here, emphasizing that dismantling carceral systems requires solidarities grounded in a deep understanding of these lived complexities. Nwauzor reminds that coalition victories can open cracks in the system, but liberation requires pushing far beyond what dominant structures are willing to concede.
Nwauzor is a case about immigrant detention wages, but its implications stretch far beyond compensation. In its nuts and bolts, the case offers a map for how assertions of executive plenary power can be constitutionally and coherently restrained in a way that allows states to legislate to improve the lives of immigrants within their jurisdictions. And in the big picture, it invites abolitionists, labor advocates, and immigrant justice organizers to consider how law can both constrain and empower their work — and how strategic alliances might advance shared goals without sacrificing deeper commitments.