Motel 6 Pays $12M Settlement

The coffers at Motel 6 are $12 million lighter after the hotel chain paid to settle a lawsuit in Washington state involving sharing guests’ personal information without their consent.

Seven locations of the motel chain are accused of giving personal information of 80,000 customers to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) between 2015 and 2017, reported Fortune magazine.

As part of the settlement, Motel 6 does not admit any wrongdoing; however, according to the article, the consent decree it signed included language reading “Motel 6 seeks to take corporate responsibility for past actions that adversely affected some of its customers, compensate those individuals who were harmed, and protect guest information with the integrity it deserves.”

This is the second lawsuit -- and payout -- for the hotel chain involving sharing customer information with U.S. immigration officials. In November, Motel 6 paid $7.6 million to settle a class-action lawsuit after multiple Motel 6 locations in Arizona gave guest lists to ICE agents, reported National Public Radio.

One anonymous hotel clerk told Phoenix New Times, "We send a report every morning to ICE — all the names of everybody that comes in ... we do the audit and we push a button and it sends it to ICE."