ICE Just Made It Legal to Work Immigrants for Free and Let Them Die in a Cell

On Monday, Immigration and Customs Enforcement quietly released a new set of National Detention Standards, the rules that govern how people are treated inside ICE jails. ICE says the standards “streamline” its regulations and “reduce the burden” on detention operators. In practice, they strip away some of the last protections detained immigrants had, and they were shaped, in part, by the for-profit prison company that profits most from them.The first change eliminates the requirement that facilities pay detained people for their labor, a wage that usually amounted to a dollar a day. The new rules go further, barring facilities from paying more than a dollar a day and reclassifying the people doing the work as “not employees.” That reclassification arrives at a convenient moment. GEO Group, one of the country’s two largest private prison companies, is currently facing class-action lawsuits from detainees demanding to be paid an actual wage for the work they’re forced to do. The new language reads almost exactly like it was written to defeat those suits.The second change scraps the requirement to provide in-person and telephone interpreters. In their place, ICE says artificial intelligence can handle what it calls “non-critical communication.” Advocates who reviewed the standards point out that “non-critical communication” includes detainee grievances, which are frequently complaints about being denied lifesaving medical care. So a person who doesn’t speak English, trying to report that they’re seriously ill, may now have that message routed through a machine that translates by guessing.The third change is the quietest and the most dangerous. Facilities are now required to accept anyone ICE sends them, even people too sick or disabled for that facility to care for. Before, a jail that couldn’t meet someone’s medical needs had to transfer them to a hospital. Now it simply has to hold them. According to the Associated Press, this also reduces the facility’s liability when a detainee dies. At least 50 people have died in ICE custody since the start of the second Trump administration.According to the Washington Post, GEO Group privately asked ICE for several of these changes, including the removal of language requiring contractors to follow state and local laws. CoreCivic, the other major private prison company, was also consulted. Both donated $500,000 each to Trump’s inaugural fund. And both border czar Tom Homan and acting ICE director David Venturella worked for GEO Group before taking the government jobs that now regulate it.Public Citizen called the new standards a gift to the for-profit contractors. The people paying for that gift are the ones with no way out.Credit to Shireen Akram-Boshar at Truthout, whose ongoing reporting on Delaney Hall and GEO Group surfaced this story.: https://truthout.org/articles/ice-releases-new-detention-regulations-benefiting-for-profit-prison-companies/https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2026/06/16/ice-removed-detainee-protections-after-private-outreach-top-contractor/ https://apnews.com/article/ice-detention-standards-conditions-immigration-detainees-5f87c9e1099cc70718a2a7f39fb7f9ffhttps://www.ice.gov/doclib/detention-standards/2026/nds2026.pdf https://www.citizen.org/news/new-ice-detention-standards-fail-to-address-detainee-exploitation/ Get full access to The Rogue Voice aka Linsay Rousseau at linsayrousseau.substack.com/subscribe