by Chuck Sharman

Two legal challenges to forced labor for minimal or no pay, which were mounted by detainees held for federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), were gaining steam when Pres. Donald J. Trump (R) was re-elected on November 5, 2024. But as his administration ramped up arrests and detention of migrant asylum seekers, both lawsuits have nearly ground to a halt.

The day after the election, the parties to a suit granted class-action status against ICE detention contractor CoreCivic told the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California that their settlement talks had failed. Within three days, in a second suit in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois—where the McHenry County Jail also contracted detention space to ICE, before the state banned the practice in 2022—Defendant jail officials bootstrapped their third-party suit against the federal government to argue that they were entitled to its “derivative” immunity from the forced labor claim.

Both suits alleged that migrant detainees were required to work—for $1 a day in California, for nothing in Illinois—in violation of the federal Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA). As PLN reported, a claim under the TVPA was first greenlighted in 2018 against another ICE detention contractor, The GEO Group, by the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Georgia. [See: PLN, Jan. 2019, p.48.]

In the Illinois suit, lead Plaintiff Aleksey Ruderman sought class certification for his forced labor claims after he was made to perform janitorial duties for the McHenry County Jail during his detention there for ICE. Then-Sheriff James Popvitz told the Chicago Tribune that this was not a job, just a requirement for all jail detainees to keep their living areas clean.

“We don’t have any forced labor,” he insisted. “It’s all their choice.”

Jailers also called another work program “voluntary” which staffed the kitchen and laundry room and provided janitorial services for jail common areas. But Ruderman said that if he or other migrant detainees refused the work, they got negative written reports—which could jeopardize their asylum cases.

After the suit was filed in April 2022, the parties spent 23 months in a slow-motion slog through discovery before the County filed a third-party complaint against ICE in March 2024. Later amended to name the United States itself in September 2024, the third-party suit accused ICE of failure to supervise its contractor, making the agency liable for damages that the County might suffer in the detainees’ wage suit.

Once the third-party suit was filed, the County also decided to mine its ICE contract for a new affirmative defense, successfully moving the district court on November 8, 2024—just days after Trump’s election—to allow filing of a new claim to “derivative sovereign immunity” from the detainees’ suit.

Predictably, that prompted a new round of discovery that slowed the entire case, which was then put on hold on October 1, 2025, when Congress let funding lapse for the federal government and furloughed Department of Justice attorneys defending the County’s third-party suit. The case remains pending, and PLN will continue to update developments. Plaintiff detainees are represented by Chicago attorneys Jacob S. Briskman and Jay Kumar and New York City attorney Raphael Janove, along with attorneys Charles D. Wysong and Elizabeth N. Mazure of Hughes Socol Piers Resnick & Dym, Ltd., also in Chicago. See: Ruderman v. McHenry Cty., USDC (N.D. Ill.), Case No. 3:22-cv-50115.

Another Class-Action Stalled
in California

Plaintiffs in the California suit had already been granted class-action status to pursue their TVPA claims against CoreCivic at its ICE detention centers nationwide, in a ruling on April 1, 2020. They hoped to replicate the success of another group of migrant detainees forced to work for minimal wages by The GEO Group, which the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington ultimately agreed had violated the TVPA and the state minimum wage law, awarding the Plaintiff class a total of $37.6 million—and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit affirmed, as PLN also reported. [See: PLN, Oct. 2025, p.22.]

The suit against CoreCivic was filed in 2017, with three classes—including one nationwide—certified in 2020, a decision largely affirmed by the Ninth Circuit on December 20, 2022. See: Owino v. Corecivic, Inc., 60 F.4th 437 (9th Cir. 2022). For much of the time since, the case “has been mired … in time-consuming discovery,” as the Southern District of California lamented in a ruling on May 3, 2024. See: Owino v. CoreCivic, Inc., 2024 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 83291 (S.D. Cal.). But by the summer of 2024, Plaintiffs had presented the district court a detailed proposal to move forward with class notification.

This was itself a tall order, since 82% of class members had by then been deported back to a long list of Latin American countries—which included Cuba and Venezuela, with whom the U.S. had no diplomatic ties. Settlement negotiations that had died in 2022 were also revived—only to hit a wall the day after Trump’s re-election. CoreCivic also said that it needed more time to produce detention records to identify class members, so the Plaintiffs were forced to postpone their class notification schedule.

The detainees had already waited out Trump’s first term, of course, only for CoreCivic to wait out the interregnum before his second term began, during which detainees made most of their progress with the suit. Whether they can wait out the President’s second term remains to be seen. The case is still pending, and PLN will continue to update its developments, too. Class counsel is provided by attorneys with Foley & Lardner, primarily in San Diego, San Francisco and Boston. Additional Plaintiff representation is provided by Seattle attorney Robert L. Teel and Florida attorneys Angeli Murthy, Charles R. Morgan and Jolie Pavlos with Morgan & Morgan offices there. See: Owino v. CoreCivic, Inc., USDC (S.D. Cal.), Case No. 3:17-cv-01112.  

Additional source: Chicago Tribune

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