Immigrant Legal Defense and Immigrant Defense Advocates present Amicus Brief in AB 32 Litigation

ILD and Immigrant Defense Advocates will appear before the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California to present an Amicus Brief filed in the case of The Geo Group, Inc. v. Newsom et al. related to AB 32, a California law banning all for-profit prisons and civil detention facilities.

The hearing is set to take place July 16th, 2020, before the Hon. Janis L. Sammartino.

The brief, which was filed in March of this year, centers on the GEO Group’s documented history of undue influence and bad-faith dealings in the state of California.

In the brief, IDA and ILD argue that GEO’s past conduct and “unclean hands” should bar them from relief.

The unclean hands doctrine derives from the equitable maxim that he who comes into equity must come with clean hands. This maxim “closes the doors of a court of equity to one tainted with inequitableness or bad faith relative to the matter in which he seeks relief, however improper may have been the behavior of the defendant.

In the matter before the Court, the Plaintiffs’ pattern of conduct with respect to the contracts at issue include documented instances of inequitable conduct and bad faith. This includes exercising undue influence over local cities in California with respect to Federal contracts, in the pursuit of Plaintiff’s financial benefit. Plaintiff has made promises to make extracontractual payments to local cities in order to secure the benefit of intergovernmental agreements and other outcomes. Plaintiff has sought to hide this influence from the public record, cloaking their intentions and goals under the guise of independent decisions made by local cities. Plaintiffs’ CEO has failed to truthfully testify about these activities while under oath. At present, Plaintiff remains engaged in a sophisticated effort to influence the cities of Adelanto and McFarland with respect to local permits and the contracts at hand. Equity requires that those seeking its protection shall have acted fairly and without fraud or deceit as to the controversy in issue.

Plaintiff’s inequitable and deceptive conduct directly relates to its pursuit of the detention contracts at issue. In applying the unclean hands doctrine, “[w]hat is material is not that the plaintiff’s hands are dirty, but that he dirtied them in acquiring the right he now asserts, or that the manner of dirtying renders inequitable the assertion of such rights against the defendants.” Republic Molding Corp. v. B.W. Photo Utilities, 319 F.2d 347, 349 (9th Cir. 1963). Plaintiffs conduct as it relates to obtaining contracts with ICE for civil detention in the state of California was rife with bad faith and deception from the outset, and culminated in the contracts for which it now seeks relief.

Read the Amicus Brief in full here

The case is The Geo Group, Inc. v. Newsom et al

Case Number: 3:19-cv-02491-JLS-WVG

Read the full oral argument presented to the court by IDA's Jackie Gonzalez here.