On November 14, 2018, immigrants detained at the Cibola County Correctional Center filed this putative class-action lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland. (Although the facility in question is located in New Mexico, the operator is organized as a Maryland corporation.) ...
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On November 14, 2018, immigrants detained at the Cibola County Correctional Center filed this putative class-action lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland. (Although the facility in question is located in New Mexico, the operator is organized as a Maryland corporation.) They sued the operator of the facility, CoreCivic, under the Fair Labor Standards Act (29 U.S.C. §§ 201-219), the New Mexico Minimum Wage Act, and the common law doctrine of unjust enrichment. The suit alleged that CoreCivic was using immigrant detainees’ labor but paying them less than the federally mandated rate of $7.25 per hour (sometimes as little as $1 per day). Represented by private counsel, they sought to recover underpaid wages and attorneys’ fees and require CoreCivic to treat all current and future Cibola detainees as employees so that they would be entitled to minimum wage. The case was assigned to Judge Richard D. Bennett.
CoreCivic filed a motion to dismiss for failure to state a claim on January 11, 2019, arguing that the plaintiffs’ custodial detention prevented them from assuming an employee/employer relationship. As such, CoreCivic argued, the plaintiffs were not eligible for the minimum wage under the statutes, and the unjust enrichment claim should therefore fail as well.
On February 26, 2019, the plaintiffs filed a motion to conditionally certify a class consisting of "all civilly detained immigrants who performed work for CoreCivic at Cibola through its work program at any time during the period beginning November 14, 2016, and continuing to the date on which notice is issued." The plaintiffs argued that their detention and working conditions at Cibola are sufficient conditions to meet the “similarly-situated” threshold required to file a class action lawsuit.
The district court dismissed the plaintiffs’ claims with prejudice on September 27, 2019. It held that the plaintiffs were not employees of CoreCivic and therefore not entitled to minimum wage. Because CoreCivic was not in violation of any statute, the unjust enrichment claim was also dismissed. 2019 WL 4735428
The plaintiffs appealed this decision to the Fourth Circuit in October 2019; as of August 2020, that appeal is pending.
Justin Hill - 09/23/2019
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