October 21, 2025

So, About That Thirteenth Amendment…

By Laura Trachtman

Did you ever wonder whether you’d need to revisit the issue of whether slavery still exists in the United States of America in this, the Year of Our Lord 2025, 160 years after the end of the Civil War? If you did, count yourself lucky, Dear Reader, because we have a humdinger of a case, Yeend et al. v. Akima Global Services, which is currently pending in the Western District of New York. 

The Plaintiffs are a certified class of noncitizens (ICE’s term) who were or are detained in the Buffalo Federal Detention Facility, which is operated by Akima Global Services ( “AGS”), a for-profit corporation. The Plaintiffs allege that, not only were they forced to work for AGS in violation of the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act (“TVPRA”), but that, in violation of New York Labor Law and Federal Labor Standards Act, they were paid a whopping $1.00 per day, and that this served to unjustly enrich Defendant.  

Defendant moved for summary judgment on all of Plaintiffs’ claims. On the TVPRA, Defendant claimed that Plaintiffs were not held in involuntary servitude “threatened with or subjected to serious harm or any other coercion,” and Plaintiffs “cannot prove that Defendant knowingly coerced their labor.” WOW is that not an argument I would want to present to the judge. The Court was not impressed with Defendant’s arguments, and noted that Plaintiffs submitted declarations from detainees who claimed they were  subject to collective punishment including a housing-unit wide “shakedown” by dozens of Defendant’s officers while Defendant’s supervisory officer claimed that he did not recall the specifics of that event.  

Defendant argued that Plaintiffs’ New York State Labor Law and FLSA claims should be dismissed because Plaintiffs were not “employees” and, therefore, not within the protections of those laws. Here, Defendant relied on case law addressing the application of New York State Labor Law to prisoners. In denying the Defendant’s motion, the Court noted that Defendant’s reliance on case law concerning the labor law’s application to prisoners in prisons is not persuasive when it comes to the labor law’s application to detainees in detention centers.  Furthermore, the Court cited to Plaintiffs’ argument that:

AGS’s supervision of the V[oluntary] W[ork] P[rogram, wherein a detainee may “volunteer” to work in order to earn money for her or his commissary] clearly evinces the control of an employer.  AGS assigns detainees their jobs and determines workers’ shifts. . . . It provides job training to detainee workers. . . . AGS maintains records of which detainees performed which jobs on each day. . . . AGS staff supervise detainee workers to ensure they perform their job adequately and they can fire detainees for poor performance. . . . AGS provides detainees with the materials and supplies they need to perform their jobs. . . . AGS pays detainees by depositing pay directly into workers’ commissary accounts and keeps records of those payments. . . . AGS determined that detainees would be paid $1 per day of work and no more than $5 per week, regardless of the number of hours or days worked. . . . In short, AGS controls all aspects of VWP participants’ job performance, from hiring, training, and supervising to setting pay policies and depositing funds into workers’ accounts. 

Finally, the Court addressed Defendant’s motion for summary judgment against Plaintiffs’ claim for unjust enrichment, wherein Plaintiffs essentially argued that Defendant was becoming rich off of Plaintiffs’ slave labor. Defendant argued that Plaintiffs’ unjust enrichment claims failed because Plaintiffs have not demonstrated that any of their labor directly benefitted Defendant, in part because the Contract did not obligate Defendant to provide various services which detainees performed.  The Court found this argument contrary to contemporaneous documents in the Court record, noting specifically that Defendant’s President and corporate representative testified during a deposition that, in essence, that AGS relied on the detainees working in the kitchen to make AGS profitable. Please recall that these detainees were paid $1.00 per day; that’s 12.5 cents per hour for an 8 hour work day, and less if they worked more. 

Take a moment to re-read the foregoing paragraph. In other words, these detainees are human beings who are forced to work for ONE DOLLAR A DAY so a corporation can make a profit.  Consider that this is happening in America today. (And before you scoff that “this couldn’t ever happen to me – I’m an American citizen!” please be aware that over 170 American citizens have been detained by ICE at raids and protests. Furthermore, United States Army veterans have been injured and arrested at protests against ICE.)

The Thirteenth Amendment prohibits slavery or involuntary servitude in the United States, yet detainees, who haven’t been convicted of a crime, are literally forced to work for $1.00 per day so a corporation can make money.  If that isn’t involuntary servitude, I don’t know what is.