GEO Group, Inc. v. Menocal

From June to September 2014, detainees at a privately run ICE detention facility in Colorado, operated by GEO Group under a federal contract, underwent a mandatory unpaid “sanitation policy” that stated those who refused to clean would be subjected to solitary confinement. 

Eventually, in October, GEO was sued for this policy. GEO attempted to get the case thrown out before trial, citing “derivative sovereign immunity”: the idea that because the group was following government order, it deserved governmental protections. 

An important aspect of this case was a single question if under the “collateral order doctrine,” certain pretrial rulings, such as denied qualified immunity, can be appealed, the sequence of events that GEO took.

The Colorado Tenth Circuit dismissed GEO’s appeal because of a lack of jurisdiction, sending the case to the Supreme Court. The main goal of the Court was to resolve a split among the circuits, several of which disagreed on the claims of contractor immunity made by GEO.

In the dispute, GEO argued that if it must litigate before appealing, it places a massive burden on individual contractors. Specifically, contractors will be forced to spend years defending suits despite having valid immunity. 

On the other hand, the detainees, backed by the government's own position at points in the litigation, argued that the defense GEO was invoking (Yearsley) is a defense to liability, not true immunity. By this reasoning, GEO is fully responsible to face and defend all suits against the contractors.

The unanimous Court agreed with the detainees: this kind of contractor defense can be fully reviewed after a final judgment, so there's no need to allow an immediate appeal. Several justices wrote separately, with Justice Alito reaching the same result through different reasoning. 

Practically, the decision means federal contractors — a category that includes everyone from private prison operators to defense manufacturers — generally cannot pause litigation early to challenge an adverse immunity ruling; they must fight the case to conclusion first, which is likely to make suits against government contractors longer and costlier to defend.