Private prison profiteer GEO Group has had yet another bad day in court. U.S. District Judge Robert Bryan ruled it must pay the state of Washington nearly $6 million “in unjust enrichment gained” through the company’s use of forced immigrant labor, state Attorney General Bob Ferguson’s office announced on Tuesday.

A federal jury had already said the private prison profiteer owed more than $17 million to detained immigrants forced to work at the Northwest ICE Processing Center (NWIPIC) for just $1 a day. Following the judge’s decision, the total amount that GEO Group must pay over its abuses now totals $23.2 million. “This is a landmark victory for workers’ rights and basic human dignity,” Ferguson said.

The jury determined last week that GEO Group violated the state’s minimum wage laws in paying immigrants detained at NWIPC $1 a day for their forced labor. Just $1 a day when GEO Group reported revenues of nearly $2.5 billion in 2019 alone, Prison Legal News said last year. The jury last week then awarded $17.3 million to immigrants “in a precedent-setting decision,” law firm Schroeter Goldmark & Bender said.

“Washington is the first state to sue a for-profit detention center for failure to pay minimum wage and for unjust enrichment,” the state attorney general’s office said. “Unjust enrichment is the increased value to GEO’s business generated from its unfair labor practices. For example, by pocketing the wages it didn’t pay over the years, GEO has had the benefit of that money for itself to invest in its business and pay its shareholders.”

Thousands of detained immigrants have borne the brunt of GEO Group’s greed, including being forced to clean in the middle of the night. “While officials portray the labor program as ‘voluntary’ in light of the 13th amendment of the US constitution, detained immigrants are often penalized for refusing to work,” Project South legal and advocacy director Azadeh Shahshahani wrote in The Guardian back in 2018. Some immigrants have been punished with solitary confinement, which is torture, for trying to refuse to work.

“Immigration detention center labor is a kind of murky area that’s been operating under the aegis of prison labor,” University of Buffalo sociology professor Erin Hatton told The Washington Post. “It’s been in dispute, but this ruling shows that they can’t get away with it without scrutiny.”

Like previously noted, among those forced to work at NWIPC was Nigerian asylum-seeker Goodluck Nwauzor, who has gained permanent residency since the time he was detained at the facility. During his detention, he was forced to clean a number of bathroom stalls used by dozens of men daily. “At the end of the day, I got one dollar,” he told the Post. He described officials making him and other detained alongside him feel like “animals,” the report continued. 

“We were afraid to ask some of the questions,” he told the Post. “You have no power of your own to do what you want to do. You have no control. They took advantage of us.”

The Post reports that following the court’s decisions, attorneys are now seeking out all immigrants who are eligible for a settlement, a task that could be difficult because they estimate only about one-quarter may actually still be in the U.S. The rest have presumably been deported. “Tracking people down is going to be a challenge, and we’re going to do the best we can,” attorney Adam Berger told the Post.