“I wanted to stand up for people who are in a position that makes it difficult to stand up for themselves.” The July 2013 suit, filed against the Fantasy Gentlemen’s Club in Grand Junction for violating the Fair Labor Standards Act and the Colorado Minimum Wage Act, resulted in a settlement award of $500,000 for 12 individuals earlier this year. The case is one of four nominated for the Colorado Trial Lawyers Association’s “Case of the Year.
El Salvador’s perpetual and ongoing violence has troubling roots of U.S. involvement, stretching back to the Reagan administration. The implementation of protected status followed El Salvador’s brutal civil war in the 1980s — a war largely funded by American dollars. Behind Egypt and Israel, El Salvador received more aid from the U.S. in the 1980s than any other country.
A bill currently making its way through New Mexico’s legislature would have a significant impact on both the state’s undocumented population and economy as a whole. The bill, which has passed both the Senate Public Affairs and Judiciary committees, would allow individuals without documents or who are otherwise unauthorized to work in the U.S. to obtain professional licenses and certifications.
In November, Midori Nishida attempted to fly from Hong Kong to Saipan (a U.S. territory) where she’d grown up and visited regularly since. She was shocked when airline staff told her she would be required to take a pregnancy test before boarding.
California has provided health benefits to undocumented minors under 18 since 2016. Now Medi-Cal will extend to young, low-income adults until they turn 26. Officials secured $98 million to expand the coverage for the estimated 138,000 undocumented adults who are now eligible for full-scope benefits under Medi-Cal.
Prisons in multiple states are phasing in tablets and e-books for inmates to use for media and communication. Though the devices aren’t explicitly intended to replace physical books, contracts between corrections departments and private prisons have coincided with attempts to ban book donations.
Since 2018, prisons in at least four states (Pennsylvania, New York, Ohio and Washington) have tried to implement bans on book donations, only relenting after public outcry, according to Reason.
The most recent contract between West Virginia Division of Corrections and Rehabilitation (WVDCR) and Global Tel Link provides 10 prisons in the state with multimedia tablets. Though WVDCR is not restricting donations on books, it does receive a 5% commission from the tablets. The agency says the funds will go toward expenses like cable TV and family visitations for the inmates. Inmates are charged per minute for use of the tablets.
In West Virginia, inmates earn between $0.04 and $0.58 an hour. An inmate earning $0.04/hr would have to work 6 hours to message or video chat, and 75 hours to earn one hour of reading. The tablets provided to WVDCR utilize a depository called Project Gutenberg, through which public domain digital books are accessible for free.
“Since Project Gutenberg archives older texts that have entered the public domain, they do not allow institutions to charge people to download their e-books and audio books. The per-minute tablet usage fees provide a clever way for GTL to profit from people reading ‘free’ books,” the Appalachian Prison Book Project wrote in a blog post.
A similar contract signed in August 2017 between JPay and New York State’s Department of Corrections earned the state over $9 million as of February of last year.
In 2017, luxury rental properties made up 79% of all apartment construction in the U.S., according to a real estate report compiled by Yardi Matrix. That trend worsened into 2018, which also saw the national rental average reach an all-time high of $1,408 a month.
A neighborhood in Arvada has a pretty special claim to fame as Colorado's first net-zero neighborhood. Plus: goats! 🐐
Produced for Versa
The Department of Justice announced to the Vera Institute of Justice it will halt funding to the Legal Orientation Program at the end of the month. The program funds legal orientations for individuals in detention centers facing deportation or removal proceedings. It serves more than 50,000 individuals in 38 detention centers annually, including the Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center in Aurora.
Produced for Law Week Colorado (print, published Feb. 2018)
On Feb. 9, the 10th Circuit upheld a district court ruling that granted class certification to a group of more than 60,000 detainees from an Aurora Immigration and Customs Enforcement Processing Center, run by The GEO Group, Inc. Members of the class were all detained at some point between 2004 and now.
The class is represented by nine individuals who were detained and worked at the facility sometime between 2013 and 2014. A smaller class of roughly between 2,000 to 3,000 individuals were part of the Detainee Voluntary Work Program, and complaints allege they were paid $1 per day for work. The larger group comprises about 60,000 detainees who were forced to work without pay, cleaning the housing units and bathrooms of the facility.
According to the complaint, detainees were threatened with solitary confinement if they did not work, a “horrific kind of punishment,” Nina DiSalvo, executive director of Towards Justice said. The organization represents the class representatives in the suit.
“I think all academic research on [solitary confinement] suggests that we should as a country be using it less often and it would certainly be psychologically damaging to detainees,” DiSalvo said. “I think most of us, if we were rational, would prefer to clean a toilet than to go to solitary confinement for any length of time.” The suit argues that GEO violated federal forced labor statutes by coercing detainees to clean.
“All ICE facilities operated by GEO, including the Aurora ICE Processing Center, are highly rated and provide high-quality services in safe, secure, and humane residential environments that meet the needs of individuals,” a statement from GEO reads. “We intend to continue to vigorously defend our company against these claims.” The statement maintains that GEO’s voluntary work program at all federal immigration facilities are “directed by the federal government and governed by federal law.”
The original complaint also brought claims that GEO violated the Colorado Minimum Wage Order and the Trafficking Victims Protection Act. In 2015, the district court granted class certification for the two classes but denied the plaintiffs’ argument that GEO violated the CMWO, as they were not considered “employees” of the facility. The 10th Circuit decision affirmed the two classes: the smaller has brought claims of unjust enrichment, the larger has alleged GEO violated the Trafficking Victims Protection Act.
The TVPA, passed in 2000, prohibits the receipt of labor or services “by means of force, threats of force, physical restraint, or threats of physical restraint to that person or another person.” Colorado’s unjust enrichment laws require that a person prove that “the defendant received a benefit at the plaintiff’s expense under circumstances that would make it unjust for the defendant to retain the benefit without commensurate compensation.” The 10th Circuit ruling denied GEO’s argument that the unjust enrichment claims do not satisfy “commonality, typicality, predominance and superiority.” The ruling focuses primarily on the predominance piece of the law, which requires that “questions of law or fact common to class members [must] predominate over any questions affecting only individual members.”
GEO’s appeal of the district court class certification claimed the court abused its discretion in granting the class certification and violated rule 23(b)(3) of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure.
The rule applies if “the court finds that the questions of law or fact common to class members predominate over any questions affecting only individual members and that a class action is superior to other available methods for fairly and efficiently adjudicating the controversy.”
GEO argued the claims of the individuals were “predominantly individualized determinations.”
“The 10th Circuit said very well the members of this class are scattered all across the country all across the world,” DiSalvo said. “The reality is that absent class certification, these people will never be able to seek justice.
GEO runs more than 50 facilities in a handful of states around the country, most located in southern Texas and California. The Aurora facility is the only one run by GEO in Colorado.
The suit stated that “GEO promised to create hundreds of quality jobs in Aurora,” a claim DiSalvo finds ironic.
The case will go back down to the federal district court to determine the merit of the complaint.
Two sets of measures concerning state legislative and congressional redistricting in Colorado are currently before the Secretary of State and the state Supreme Court, each vying for victory in the form of inclusion on the 2018 state ballot. And though both initiatives aim to change the state’s redistricting process, the proponents of the measures have fundamental differences on the best way to approach reform.
A forthcoming report on eviction by the Colorado Center on Law and Policy compiled Denver County court data from 2014 to 2016. The sample looks at every eviction case led by the Denver Housing Authority and from seven private property management companies. The report found that in 100 percent of those cases, a property manager or housing authority had representation, whereas tenants of the housing authority had representation roughly 3 percent of the time.
“I wanted to stand up for people who are in a position that makes it difficult to stand up for themselves.” The July 2013 suit, filed against the Fantasy Gentlemen’s Club in Grand Junction for violating the Fair Labor Standards Act and the Colorado Minimum Wage Act, resulted in a settlement award of $500,000 for 12 individuals earlier this year. The case is one of four nominated for the Colorado Trial Lawyers Association’s “Case of the Year.
In 2014, the Pew Research Center estimated that there were roughly 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the U.S., 51 percent of whom are women. Most hail from Mexico and Latin America. One in six Latina women survive rape, attempted rape and sexual assault, while rates of domestic violence are even higher.
Earlier this month, the Office of Institutional Equity and Compliance released data from the sexual misconduct survey conducted late last year. The survey found that 28 percent of undergraduate women have experienced some form of unwanted sexual contact during their time at CU. These experiences ranged from unwanted touching to rape, and 15 percent of all respondents reported some form of sexual assault on and off campus during their time at the university.
Title IX, an education amendment introduced in 1972, prohibits discrimination on the basis of gender. It mandates that no student “be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.”
The Washington Post-Kaiser foundation has confirmed that 20 to 25 percent of women and 7 percent of men have experienced unwanted sexual contact to some degree during their college career, a statistic that has been consistent for more than 15 years. Despite this prevalence, in 2014 a Senate subcommittee found that 41 percent of 236 universities surveyed had conducted zero sexual assault investigations during the past five years.
When such a high volume of students experience sexual violence, public universities and institutions have a requirement to keep students safe and investigate these claims under Title IX guidelines. As of April 2015, more than 113 investigations of Title IX violations at 106 institutions across the U.S. are ongoing, including the University of Colorado Boulder. These investigations center on the handling of sexual assault cases and the punitive punishments levied by institutions, which rarely include expulsion.
CU is no stranger to criticism regarding its handling of sexual assault reports. From 1999 to 2004, there were six high-profile reports of sexual assault. In 2007, the university settled for $2.8 million with Lisa Simpson and Anne Gilmore, two women who were raped at a party by football players and high school recruits while they were students in 2001. “The facts of this particular case were egregious,” Jocelyn Samuels, an attorney with the National Women’s Law Center said. “But ultimately what I think is most relevant for other universities is to recognize that the law means what it says. They have a legal obligation to ensure the safety of their students.”
According to Sarah Gilchriese, the student who filed the most recent federal complaint against CU for Title IX violations, university administration failed to impose an appropriate penalty on her assailant.
“He approached me on campus a couple times, but when I told the university they didn’t care. I wanted a restraining order for personal reasons for the rest of my life, I just didn’t want him around me. At the very minimum they should’ve suspended him until I was off campus,” Gilchriese explained.
Gilchriese, who was raped by a fellow CU student in February of 2013, filed a report with the Code of Conduct office shortly after the assault. The Code of Conduct office notified her assailant that due to the severity of her allegations, during that time he was not to have any contact with her. The notice stated that “Any harassing contact with Sarah could be construed as retaliatory in nature and result in additional judicial or criminal charges.”
Despite this ruling, the assailant approached her twice on campus, and the university did not respond to her concerns about this for five weeks. He was never expelled, and only forced to remain off campus after Gilchriese worked with the Boulder Police to file a protective order. The order requires him to stay 100 feet away from her and the campus, at all times, for the rest of her life.
CU settled with Gilchriese for $32,500, more than a year after her assault. She will graduate this December, a semester later than she originally intended. Gilchriese dropped out of two classes in spring 2013 while her assailant was allowed to remain on campus.
The Office of Institutional Equity and Compliance, whose primary role is to enforce policy around sexual misconduct, protected class discrimination and harassment, is under ongoing federal investigation. Gilchriese feels the university has made changes since her complaint, but also maintains that better and more frequent education initiatives around consent and sexual assault need to be implemented.
“The management and the bureaucracy needs to handle how they talk about the reporting process, how they handle the reporting process and then how they actually impose sanctions,” Gilchriese said.
This summer, the House of Representatives introduced the Safe Campus Act as proposed legislation regarding the handling and reporting of sexual assault on college campuses. If passed, it would enact a mandatory stipulation requiring assault and rape victims to report to police before the university is able to take action. Another section of the bill allows universities to set their own standard of proof regarding rape and assault cases.
