The GEO Group, Inc., a Florida Corporation v. Ugochukwu Nwauzor, et al.

The GEO Group, Inc. is a service provider at the Northwest ICE Processing Center (“NWIPC”) in Tacoma, Washington, under contract with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (“ICE”). Consistent with congressional direction, that federal contract requires GEO to offer the immigration detainees at the facility the opportunity to participate in a voluntary work program. The program is designed not to treat immigration detainees, who are generally ineligible for lawful work in the United States, as employees, but to give them an outlet to avoid idleness during their detention. To that end, while all ICE detention facilities must offer the program, Congress has long capped the amount it will reimburse from appropriated funds at $1 per day per participant. Washington state had radically different ideas, and would classify federal immigration detainees participating in this federal voluntary work program as ordinary employees entitled to the state minimum wage, even as it exempts its own detainees from that same law. The Ninth Circuit blessed this extraordinary inversion of our constitutional order, rejecting intergovernmental immunity and preemption arguments endorsed by three other circuits and the three most recent administrations, and saddling GEO with an approximately $37 million judgment that has forced the suspension of the federal work program at the federal facility at issue. The question presented is: Whether the Supremacy Clause allows a state to reclassify federal immigration detainees participating in a federal work program as employees and thereby