ALEKSEY RUDERMAN ARTURO SALDIVAR CHRIS POCKNELL v. KENOSHA COUNTY WISCONSIN (2026)

Since 2000 the Kenosha County Jail has contracted with federal agencies to house aliens who are detained pending hearings or removal. According to the complaint, whose allegations we must accept at this stage, the Jail requires these civil detainees to perform unpaid custodial work, such as sweeping floors and cleaning phones, tables, or showers. Aliens who refuse may be disciplined by loss of commissary privileges, loss of phone privileges, or solitary confinement for as long as ten days.

Three aliens filed this suit under 18 U.S.C. § 1589, a criminal statute that has a civil damages remedy (18 U.S.C. § 1595). The salient parts of § 1589 provide:

(a) Whoever knowingly provides or obtains the labor or services of a person by any one of, or by any combination of, the following means—

(1) by means of force, threats of force, physical restraint, or threats of physical restraint to that person or another person;

(2) by means of serious harm or threats of serious harm to that person or another person;

(3) by means of the abuse or threatened abuse of law or legal process; or

(4) by means of any scheme, plan, or pattern intended to cause the person to believe that, if that person did not perform such labor or services, that person or another person would suffer serious harm or physical restraint ․

(c) In this section:

(1) The term “abuse or threatened abuse of law or legal process” means the use or threatened use of a law or legal process, whether administrative, civil, or criminal, in any manner or for any purpose for which the law was not designed, in order to exert pressure on another person to cause that person to take some action or refrain from taking some action.

(2) The term “serious harm” means any harm, whether physical or nonphysical, including psychological, financial, or reputational harm, that is sufficiently serious, under all the surrounding circumstances, to compel a reasonable person of the same background and in the same circumstances to perform or to continue performing labor or services in order to avoid incurring that harm.

The district court dismissed the suit on the pleadings, ruling that § 1589 applies only to human trafficking, a term that cannot plausibly be applied to discipline during lawful custody. 752 F. Supp. 3d 1084 (E.D. Wis. 2024).

The district court based its conclusion not on the language of § 1589, or its title (“Forced labor”), but on the title and imputed purpose of a larger enactment of which § 1589 is a part: The Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000. Large-scale legislation such as the 2000 statute often contains provisions that do not fit neatly under an umbrella title; a bill that seems fated to pass may attract amendments on multiple topics, and the sponsors of these amendments may have aims that differ from those of the floor managers. To figure out what § 1589 means, we must look at what it says rather than what else was enacted at the same time. Other parts of the 2000 statute deal directly with human trafficking—both forced labor under threats and sex trafficking. Sections 1590 to 1592 are among these provisions. We must deal with § 1589 on its own terms.

At least two courts of appeals have concluded that § 1589 applies to labor required of civil immigration detainees: Gonzalez v. CoreCivic, Inc., 986 F.3d 536 (5th Cir. 2021), and Barrientos v. CoreCivic, Inc., 951 F.3d 1269 (11th Cir. 2020). Another has held that § 1589 is not limited to human trafficking. Burrell v. Staff, 60 F.4th 25, 39 (3d Cir. 2023). Adopting the district court's approach would put us in conflict with those three circuits.

We appreciate the need for modesty in dealing with § 1589, because read for all it could be worth the statute would forbid prisons from requiring even convicted felons to work, a break from traditional practice (and from the language of the Thirteenth Amendment) that would have occasioned comment during the legislative process. Yet no one in Congress suggested that § 1589 would make it a crime for a prison's warden to require felons to labor as part of their punishment. That's why we held in Taylor v. Salvation Army, 110 F.4th 1017, 1032 (7th Cir. 2024), that, despite § 1589, convicts may be required to work—not only in prison but also as part of work-release programs. Plaintiffs do not ask us to reconsider Taylor, but they stress that none of them has been convicted of a crime. Aliens held pending hearings or removal are civil detainees. (Some of the detainees have been charged with crimes, but as far as the complaint goes none is serving time on a criminal conviction.)

Gonzalez and Barrientos hold that § 1589 applies to civil detention of aliens, but not that it was violated in either case. Both suits were remanded and were either settled (Barrientos) or dismissed without prejudice (Gonzalez). Kenosha County does not want us to address the merits in this suit either. It contends that § 1589 does not apply to public jails. The detention facilities in Gonzalez and Barrientos were private. Kenosha tells us that public facilities, by contrast, are not within the scope of the statute's first word: “Whoever”.

This is hard to accept. Counties lack the sovereign immunity accorded to their parent states. For the purpose of federal jurisdiction under 28 U.S.C. § 1332, a county is treated as a “citizen” of its state, just like any natural person. See Moor v. Alameda County, 411 U.S. 693, 718–21 (1973). For the purpose of 42 U.S.C. § 1983, one of the principal civil-rights statutes, a county (unlike a state) is a “person” subject to suit for damages. Compare Monell v. New York City Department of Social Services, 436 U.S. 658, 690 (1978) (municipalities are “persons”), with Will v. Michigan Department of State Police, 491 U.S. 58 (1989) (states are not “persons”). A comprehensive word such as “whoever” includes all juridical “persons”. True, states may be able to invoke sovereign immunity (unless we understand § 1589 to be based on § 2 of the Thirteenth Amendment or § 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment, see Fitzpatrick v. Bitzer, 427 U.S. 445 (1976)), but counties and other municipalities lack that protection. In Wisconsin counties are “bod[ies] corporate, authorized to sue and be sued.” Wis. Stat. § 59.01.

The Dictionary Act, 1 U.S.C. § 1, tells us that “the words ‘person’ and ‘whoever’ include corporations, companies, associations, firms, partnerships, societies, and joint stock companies, as well as individuals”. Kenosha County takes comfort in the fact that this definition does not mention municipalities. But it uses the word “include” and does not rule out any kind of entity. By grouping “person” and “whoever” under a single definition, the Dictionary Act invites the conclusion that an entity classified as a “person” comes within “whoever” as well. We know from Monell that counties in Wisconsin are “persons” under § 1983 and from Moor that they are treated like natural persons for the purpose of § 1332. We hold that the word “whoever” in § 1589 includes “bod[ies] corporate” such as counties in Wisconsin. (Whether “whoever” includes the national government is a distinct question, given the approach of decisions such as Department of Agriculture v. Kirtz, 601 U.S. 42 (2024). We do not address it today.)

Putting the prohibitions in § 1589(a) together with the definitions in § 1589(c) leads to the conclusion that a county jail violates § 1589 by threatening civil detainees with solitary confinement to coerce them to work. Section 1589(a)(1) says that threats of “physical restraint” are forbidden—and solitary confinement is one form of physical restraint. Similarly § 1589(a)(3) says that “abuse of the law or legal process” is a forbidden means to compel work. The definition of that phrase in § 1589(c)(1) shows that, when law or legal process authorize work—as statutes or regulations may do for convicted prisoners—there is no “abuse” in requiring work. But in supplemental briefs filed after oral argument, Kenosha County did not contend that any statute or regulation authorizes its work requirement for civil detainees. The contracts under which federal agencies have sent detainees to the County Jail say, to the contrary, that the Jail is authorized to offer paid work to detainees, not that it is authorized to compel unpaid work from detainees.

Once again, we recognize that this statute must be applied with care lest it condemn many common practices. Take § 1589(a)(2), which prohibits threats of “serious harm” to induce labor. Section 1589(c)(2) defines this phrase to mean “any harm, ․ including psychological, financial, or reputational harm, that is sufficiently serious, under all the surrounding circumstances, to compel a reasonable person of the same background and in the same circumstances to perform or to continue performing labor or services in order to avoid incurring that harm.” Suppose an opera company that has signed a famous tenor to sing the role of Radames in Aida reminds him that, if he doesn't show up, he not only won't be paid but also won't be hired in the future. That threat of financial harm may induce the tenor to sing—indeed, that's the point. Yet treating the statement “you won't be paid if you don't work” as a federal crime would wreck the law of contract at a stroke.

Many other situations come to mind in which broad application of the language in § 1589 would be jarring and implausible. We need not rehearse them. In Taylor we found work-as-punishment-for-crime outside the scope of § 1589. That may be true of our opera singer too—without jeopardizing the understanding that the statute covers an au pair who arrives with an agreement to do housework for pay and then is held as an indentured servant without compensation or a passport.

Whatever may be said about convicted felons and market transactions, nothing in either the text or context of § 1589 permits a local jail to compel civil detainees—persons not subject to punishment—to work on pain of solitary confinement or loss of phone contact with the outside world. The complaint alleges threats that cannot be dismissed as too slight to activate the statute. Whether the allegations of the complaint can be proved, and if so what damages are appropriate, are among the questions open on remand. The district judge also should consider the County's argument that the statute is unconstitutionally vague, a subject on which an appellate court should not be first to speak.

VACATED AND REMANDED

EASTERBROOK, Circuit Judge.