HUMAN TRAFFICKING WATCH · DISPATCH
At Otay Mesa, Labor Allegations Mount
San Diego lawsuits join a national fight over $1-a-day detention work.
Two San Diego lawsuits say immigrant detainees at Otay Mesa were coerced to work for $1 a day, echoing cases in Colorado, Georgia, and Texas that challenge whether ICE’s “voluntary” program crosses into forced labor and trafficking.
In San Diego, two civil cases filed months apart in 2017—Owino v. CoreCivic in May and Novoa v. GEO Group in December—alleged that immigrants held at the Otay Mesa Detention Facility were compelled to work for $1 per day under ICE’s Voluntary Work Program. Plaintiffs said refusal brought retaliation—solitary confinement, transfers to more dangerous dormitories, or the withholding of basics like food, toilet paper, and soap—turning a program labeled voluntary into a lever of control inside a locked, federally contracted site. With roughly 35,000 people in immigration detention on any given day, the San Diego filings put a national practice into local focus, asking whether indispensable facility labor was being extracted by coercion rather than consent. What began as complaints about the facility’s daily operations became allegations of trafficking that demanded courtroom scrutiny of how “voluntary” is defined when no one can walk away.
The Otay Mesa allegations formed part of a broader wave: Menocal v. GEO Group, filed in October 2014 by nine people at the Aurora Detention Facility in Colorado, was certified as a class action in February, signaling systemic claims that extended beyond a single site. In February 2018, Martha Gonzalez filed Gonzalez v. CoreCivic after periods of confinement in La Salle County, Hutto, and Laredo, Texas; in April 2018, Wilhen Hill Barrientos and two others sued over conditions at Georgia’s Stewart Detention Center. Across five CoreCivic sites and one GEO facility, the complaints asserted a common pattern—$1 wages and explicit consequences for declining to work—placing detention labor practices squarely before judges in multiple jurisdictions. In San Diego, the Owino and Novoa filings tethered that national pattern to Otay Mesa and asked whether those same pressures operated inside a local detention hub.
The infrastructure behind these claims had been documented for years: a 2014 New York Times investigation found Voluntary Work Programs in 55 detention centers, 34 operated by private prison corporations; by then, private firms controlled more than 60 percent of immigration detention beds nationwide. ICE set the wage at $1 per day, a token rate that dovetailed with corporate scale and public contracts. CoreCivic reported approximately $444.1 million in revenue in 2017, with about one-quarter derived from ICE detention, while GEO Group reported spending roughly $3.3 million on lobbying and about $3 million in campaign contributions in 2016. Those figures traced the stakes behind San Diego’s lawsuits, where $1-a-day work was alleged to be the hidden engine of facility operations rather than a benign option for passing time.
San Diego’s filings distilled a national fight to a direct question: when the government and its contractors hold people who cannot leave, can a program called “voluntary” be lawful if work is induced by threats of isolation, transfer, or deprivation. Plaintiffs like Martha Gonzalez and Wilhen Hill Barrientos said the answer was no, arguing the conduct constituted forced labor and trafficking under federal law. From Otay Mesa to facilities in Georgia and Colorado, the court record now carries parallel allegations that ask judges to define the boundary between consent and compulsion in detention. Taken together, the cases force an accounting of who benefits when $1-a-day labor becomes a line item on a balance sheet.
Locations: San Diego, Mesa, Stewart Detention Center, Aurora Detention Facility
Tags: investigation, labor, local, federal