to $5,000 to have electronic monitoring devices removed from immigrants who were allowed to remain free on bail if they wore the monitors. Elisa Pelaez was sentenced to thirty-three months in federal prison, and others were set to be sentenced later in the year. In December 2019, 13 fathers in Texas sued the company alleging family separation. Due to the controversies surrounding mass incarceration of immigrants in private for-profit detention centers, several banks, including Bank of America, Wells Fargo and JPMorgan Chase, announced that they would no longer offer lines of credit and term loans to the companies involved. Operation Mississippi Hustle A federal investigation dubbed Operation Mississippi Hustle, initiated in 2014 or earlier by the United States Attorney and prosecuted in the United States District Court for the Southern District of Mississippi, examined the relationship between officials of the Mississippi Department of Corrections and local jurisdictions, and various prison contractors and subcontractors. The investigation resulted in indictments against the commissioner of the Department of Corrections, and the longtime mayor of Walnut Grove, Mississippi, both of whom resigned from office. As a result of this investigation, in February 2017, Mississippi State Attorney General Jim Hood announced a civil suit against 15 contractors and several persons for damages and punitive damages, to recover the amounts of state contracts awarded under Epps during the roughly decade-long period when he has been found to have been taking bribes. GEO Group was among the for-profit prison management companies named in this suit. Hood said that the company had been awarded $260 million in contracts in an eight-year period. Washington state lawsuit In September 2017, Washington State Attorney General Bob Ferguson sued GEO Group for not paying immigrant detainees the state's $11 hourly minimum wage, characterizing the detainees as "a captive population of vulnerable individuals who cannot easily advocate for themselves". The corporation was paying detainees with snacks or $1 per day for their labor which provided all the non-security employment at its Northwest Detention Center, a facility in Tacoma, Washington. In 2021, a Seattle jury found for the detainees, setting compensation for them in the amount of $17.3 million, with U.S. District Judge Robert Jensen Bryan ordering an additional $5.9 million to be paid to the state of Washington, bringing the total to $23.2 million. See also Incarceration in the United States References External links Charleston DePriest v. Christopher Epps and Tom Burnham, 2012