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ICE wrote the rule: discharge a detainee before death, and the agency owes no account. Expect the gravely ill pushed out in their final days, each one slipping past what ICE will report.
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Alex Grey, Collective Subconscious (1978). The grid records the triumph of structure over personhood. When a society ceases to recognize the humanity of its own people, a civilization begins to forfeit its soul.
ICE rewrote its detention rules this week to serve its largest contractor, stripping the wage protections GEO pushed to remove. A June 4 memo from acting director David Venturella had already killed the rule requiring ICE to report any death within thirty days of release, the safeguard that once stopped the agency from discharging the dying to keep their deaths off the books. A death after release now goes uncounted.
GEO runs over twenty immigration detention centers and has fought minimum-wage suits in Washington, New Jersey, and Colorado for years. Detainees cook, clean, and maintain the buildings for a dollar a day, a rate a 1950 policy fixed and froze. Executives call the labor voluntary.
Douglas MacMillan broke the story in the Washington Post on June 16, after GEO pressed officials in private for specific edits, a person familiar with the talks said. On Monday, June 15, ICE posted the revised standards, struck the duty to obey state and local law, and reclassified detainees as something other than employees.
ICE granted most of GEO’s wish list. The new code declares that detainees earn neither wages nor benefits, drops the one-dollar floor, and scrubs the state and local compliance language. Officials refused one ask, a bid for taxpayers to cover up to one hundred million dollars in GEO’s wage-suit losses.
WHAT THE AGENCY CHANGED
The dollar-a-day wage floor — removed June 15, 2026
The duty to follow state and local law — removed June 15, 2026
The rule to report deaths after release — rescinded by memo June 4, 2026
Two former GEO men now run federal enforcement. Border czar Tom Homan consulted for a GEO Group division and disclosed more than five thousand dollars in fees before his appointment. ICE acting chief David Venturella took the helm in 2026 after years as a senior company executive over detention centers, then oversaw the contracts feeding his old employer.
Venturella removed the labor safeguards on June 15 and rescinded the post-release death count on June 4. A single official loosened the rules and shut off the count.
Senator Elizabeth Warren identified an pressed the conflict of interest. On May 27, she demanded that Venturella disclose any financial tie to GEO Group, the contractor he served and the agency he now governs.
MAGA Inc., Trump’s flagship super-PAC, spends without limit on his behalf, and megadonors fund ninety-six percent of it in million-dollar gifts. The war chest hit three hundred four million dollars for the midterms, an operation the Times calls pay-for-access, trading pardons, rulings, and ambassadorships for early money.
GEO pocketed over a billion in federal payments last year, then funneled two million to that super-PAC through its Reentry arm since October 2025, while GEO and CoreCivic each handed half a million to Trump’s December 2024 inaugural fund. A modest bribe bought an immense return.
Renting the imprisoned at a price the jailer sets is not new. In 1941, the German chemical conglomerate IG Farben rented prisoners from the SS beside Auschwitz at three Reichsmarks a day, four for skilled labor, and withheld every wage. Director Otto Ambros thanked the SS for a fruitful friendship while the camp absorbed the dead, and Nuremberg called the arrangement a crime. ICE refines the model now, stripping the wage floor, so GEO pays a pittance and the law stops recognizing the worker as owed anything.
Legal scholars doubt the edits will save GEO in court. Federal and state law counts anyone who works for pay as an employee, and Jacqueline Stevens of Northwestern insists a contract cannot rewrite that. The Supreme Court agreed in February 2026, clearing a Colorado forced-labor case to proceed. Washington judges have already hit the firm with over twenty-three million dollars.
That dollar-a-day work now fuels a revolt inside the largest GEO jail. On June 11, dozens of women in unit 1 of Delaney Hall in Newark renewed the hunger and labor strike, and ten complaints now name one guard for sexual assault the company still employs.
A letter from inside reports hair loss, anxiety attacks, sleeplessness, and depression, unsafe drinking water, and meals that fall short of nutrition. Guards answer the organizing with pepper spray, beatings, and transfers, and ICE shipped nearly three hundred strikers out over one weekend, a move advocates call an effort to break the strike.
Rodney Taylor spent fifteen months at Georgia’s Stewart Detention Center. A double amputee, he crawled on his amputation sites across floors he calls fouled with mold and feces to reach a shower. The Liberian-born barber and father of seven won release on May 1, after a congressional demand.
ICE and its contractors deny the record. DHS brands the Delaney Hall strike a hoax, and CoreCivic calls Taylor’s account fiction. Yet neither will open the doors or order the death audits.
The dragnet reaches far past the people the agency names. Federal data shows more than seventy percent of ICE detainees carry no criminal conviction, and leaked figures put violent convictions at five percent. A single clerical error can drop a citizen into a cell, and each new contract widens the net toward your own family.
ICE confines roughly sixty thousand people today, and at least twenty have died in custody this year, about one a week, outpacing last year’s two-decade high.
This week ICE stopped paying detainees, freed its contractors from state law, and stopped reporting those who die after release. The detained serve as a gateway to greater atrocities tested on the one population the law has stripped of the power and personhood.
ICE gutted the wage rules at GEO’s urging and erased the death rule on Venturella’s own order, and the same tactic will work again long after the anger fades.
The rules changed because the system is built to hold far more people than it can answer for, and the new code makes the next disappearance legal before it happens. Only a subpoena from Warren, a federal judge, or an investigative reporter drags the deaths back into public view and proves that these were people. This is the warning: thousands will labor for a dollar, others will die unrecorded, and the silence will hold until the cell holds someone you love.
Our work continues,
Wendy
Sources
Douglas MacMillan, “ICE removed detainee protections after private outreach from top contractor,” Washington Post — https://www.washingtonpost.
com/business/2026/06/16/ice- removed-detainee-protections- after-private-outreach-top- contractor/ “Hundreds at Delaney Hall Join Detained People Across Country in Hunger Strike Against Inhumane Conditions,” ACLU — https://www.aclu.org/news/
immigrants-rights/hundreds-at- delaney-hall-join-detained- people-across-country-in- hunger-strike-against- inhumane-conditions “A New Generation of MAGA Megadonors Is Emerging,” NOTUS — https://www.notus.org/money/
maga-megadonors-donald-trump- super-pac “ICE reports 18th detainee death in 4 months, putting agency on track for new record,” CBS News — https://www.cbsnews.com/news/
ice-detainee-deaths-2026/ Maria Sacchetti, “ICE to stop reporting deaths of newly released detainees, internal memo says,” Washington Post — https://www.washingtonpost.
com/immigration/2026/06/04/ ice-stop-reporting-deaths- newly-released-detainees- internal-memo-says/ “Immigration Detention Quick Facts,” TRAC, Syracuse University — https://tracreports.org/
immigration/quickfacts/ “5% of People Detained By ICE Have Violent Convictions, 73% No Convictions,” Cato Institute — https://www.cato.org/blog/5-
ice-detainees-have-violent- convictions-73-no-convictions Irene Wright, “Double amputee held by ICE in Georgia shares story upon release,” USA TODAY — https://www.aol.com/articles/
double-amputee-georgia-ice- detention-165411016.html Senator Elizabeth Warren, letter to Acting ICE Director David Venturella on GEO Group financial ties, May 27, 2026 — https://www.warren.senate.gov/
imo/media/doc/warren_ethics_ letter_to_david_venturella.pdf
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