A top private prison company profiting from President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown is claiming immunity from lawsuits alleging forced labor at its detention centers. To do so, the company is using a controversial legal doctrine best known for shielding cops from police brutality claims.

The prison contractor, GEO Group, is one of the world’s largest prison companies and a longtime Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) contractor. The prison firm has been a generous donor to the Trump administration, and its work for ICE has expanded significantly over the last year and a half. The company operates detention facilities for ICE across the country, many of which have long histories of abuse allegations.

In 2014, immigrants detained in a GEO Group-run ICE facility in Colorado sued the company for violating state labor and trafficking laws. The detainees alleged that the facility’s work program paid only $1 a day, and in some cases, they were forced to clean the facility without pay at all. For more than a decade, GEO Group has avoided a trial in the case, but one is now scheduled for the fall in Colorado federal court.

In a recent court filing, as the American Prospect first reported, GEO Group attempted a new legal maneuver to thwart the case, claiming it was entitled to qualified immunity because it was acting at the government’s behest. Therefore, the company contended it could not be sued for forced labor. Their argument, explained Michael Scimone, an attorney representing the plaintiffs, was that the private prison company “should be treated the same as a police officer, as a public servant.”

“What this really allows is for basically an absence of any accountability,” Scimone continued. A private company is not subject to the same degree of public accountability as the government, he noted — one reason why it is typically easier to bring a case against a private actor in court.

Qualified immunity shields police officers from liability in cases of misconduct or violence, making it difficult to bring lawsuits against cops for civil rights violations — even if they broke the law.

It’s not the first time GEO Group has tried to circumvent of the lawsuit by claiming it has immunity typically reserved for public officials. Last year, the company appealed a ruling in the same Colorado case to the Supreme Court, asking for “derivative sovereign immunity.” This protection extends the federal government’s legal shield against private lawsuits to its contractors.

The Supreme Court rejected GEO Group’s case, ruling in favor of detainees — but Justice Samuel Alito included a note in his concurrence in the case that qualified immunity, which protects individual government officials from lawsuits except in narrow circumstances, might be another avenue that private companies could pursue. Now, as their trial looms, GEO Group has seized on Alito’s reference.

As the government outsources ever more of its duties to private firms, those vendors are demanding ever more immunity from legal consequences. While the Supreme Court rebuffed one kind of immunity for government contractors last fall, a Sixth Circuit ruling last year held that qualified immunity could extend to a private law firm working with the government, a victory for private companies.

GEO Group’s bid for qualified immunity appears unlikely to succeed — and is more likely a delay tactic, experts told the Lever. Anya Bidwell, an attorney leading the Institute for Justice Project on Immunity and Accountability, told the Lever the argument was a “long shot.” But it’s a sign of how hard the private firms that work with ICE are fighting to operate with impunity.

“We’re keeping a very close eye on this because we are seeing contractors trying to expand it,” Bidwell said.