A proposed settlement was reached today in a sweeping class action lawsuit against the GEO detention center for forcing thousands of immigrants detained inside to do hard labor for $1 a day, plaintiffs attorneys confirmed to CPR News.
Details of the settlement agreement, which will still need to be approved by a federal judge, were not disclosed, but the agreement reached between attorneys representing thousands of immigrants detained between 2004 and 2014 in Aurora and the for-profit company GEO Group was confirmed by plaintiff attorneys David Seligman and Hans Meyer.
The GEO Group operates for-profit prisons and immigration detention centers across the country, and lawyers have argued its business model enriches the company and its shareholders on the backs of people detained inside.
In previous interviews before the agreement was reached Monday morning, Meyer and Seligman said the fact that the case, which is more than a decade old, was finally going to trial was a victory in and of itself.
“At its core, this case is about our clients who are real people in our community standing up to a multinational corporation that engaged in profiteering from this forced labor,” Meyer said. “This is the first step in holding this corporation accountable for exploiting human beings.”
The so-called Menocal v. GEO case has had quite a journey since it was initially filed more than a decade ago. Alejandro Menocal, who was detained in Aurora for a few months in 2014, said he was forced to do hard labor inside the facility or else he would be physically restrained in solitary confinement. Immigrants also alleged they were paid $1 per day that unjustly enriched the company because immigrants were keeping up the maintenance.
So Menocal sued on behalf of immigrants detained at the immigrant detention facility in Adams County over the course of a decade, claiming the GEO Group was “unjustly” enriching themselves by running the detention center, the food, janitorial and laundry services, for pennies by the hour, which allowed them to maximize profits.
GEO pushed back, essentially claiming that as a federal contractor they couldn’t be held accountable for the same laws that applied to other businesses because they were doing what the federal government asked them to do. The case took years and wound its way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which decided 9-0 last year that Menocal could proceed with his claims.
Jury selection in the trial had been scheduled to start Monday morning.
“That’s what this trial is about,” said Seligman, who runs the advocacy law firm Towards Justice, on Friday. “GEO is all about cutting costs. And it makes billions of taxpayer dollars a year. So whatever corners it’s able to cut, that money goes to its executives and shareholders and the evidence we’re going to put forward in this trial, is that the way they’ve been able to do that is through exploiting a captive labor force.”
As of Monday morning, potential jurors were gathering and answering questions about serving and opening statements were expected Tuesday morning.
The Geo Group did not have an immediate comment on the proposed settlement agreement. Lawyers representing the plaintiffs said “in the face of long odds” they kept fighting for justice and “this settlement shows that our legal system can still sometimes provide justice, even for the most marginalized.”
“Our clients suffered the inhumane treatment alleged here while locked up in a detention center just a few miles from the federal courthouse,” the attorneys said, in a statement. “And like so many across the country, they’ve been victimized by a broken immigration system.”
This story was updated at 2:47 p.m. on Nov. 2, 2026 with additional comments from the plaintiff’s attorneys.
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