Long known for its “prison economy,” Louisiana now houses more ice detention facilities than any other non-state.
Big businesses behind Louisiana’s ice detention
Many rural Louisiana communities rely on prison economies, including immigration detention centers, to maintain their livelihoods.
Winpalish, Los Angeles – Thousands await their fate in immigration prisons, far from the jazz clubs and nightlife in New Orleans.
Louisiana has more dedicated immigration and customs detention centers than any state other than Texas (total of nine) after converting almost half a dozen correctional facilities into immigration detention. Most are far away and scattered near farms and forests. Among the sites is the unique “stage facility” of the countryside airport tarmac for rapid deportation.
President Donald Trump is increasingly leaning towards Republican-led southern states to detain, detain, detain, detain and deport millions of migrants from the Florida Everglades’ “Crocodile Alcatraz” to the vast expansion of Georgia immigration facilities. Far from the US-Mexico border, Mississippi has the ice prison with the highest average daily population.
However, Louisiana was the first non-border state to surge in immigration detention capacity, according to the American Civil Liberties Union and the Tulane University Law School in Louisiana. The state opened five new facilities to detain immigrants in 2019 during the first Trump administration, significantly increasing the number of detainees during the Biden administration.
Immigrants are sent from here from all over the country, far from their families, their communities and often from their lawyers.
The Trump administration has locked in some of Louisiana’s most well-known detainees, including the now-released Columbia University activist Mahmoud Halil and Harvard University scientist Xenia Petrova.
The Wynn Correctional Center, the state’s largest immigration prison, is shoved deep into a dense, pine forest northwest, nearly five hours in New Orleans. The site is so remote that for years online maps have regularly sent visitors the wrong way. Warning signs warn visitors: “This facility is being used to train tracking dogs.”
Other states may follow Louisiana’s example as more federal funds flow into ice detention. Congress recently allowed the Trump administration to spend $45 billion over the next four years to expand immigration prisons across the country. That’s almost four times the previous annual detention budget for ICE.
USA Today traveled to four of Louisiana’s nine ice facilities. However, the Department of Homeland Security and the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement have rejected multiple requests for tours of either location.
DHS aide Tricia McLaughlin said in an emailed statement that ICE originally expanded Louisiana’s detention capacity and “addresses an increase in the number of individuals arrested at the border.”
“ICE continues to explore all options to remove detainees from the United States as quickly as possible, whilst meeting current and future detention requirements,” she said.
Nora Ahmed, legal director at the Louisiana ACLU, described the state as the key to Trump’s promised mass expulsion campaign.
“Louisiana is the epicenter of many of what’s going on in this administration,” Ahmed said. “This is an outcrop of the prison economy where Louisiana has been surviving for a long time.”
An international hub far from the border
Louisiana found its foothold as a hub for deportation at the end of Trump’s first term as the administration was about to expand immigration detention.
The state reformed the criminal justice system in 2017 with bipartisan support to reduce sentences for low-level offenders. It had the effect of dramatically reducing the state’s prison population and liberating thousands of imprisoned people: black men and women.
At the time, black incarceration rates were almost four times that of white incarceration rates in Louisiana, according to the ACLU.
Louisiana eventually rolled the reforms. However, racial justice activists temporarily celebrated the victory.
Then the ice knocked.
The first Trump administration, and later the Biden administration, wanted to detain more illegal border crossers. Louisiana offered advantages: empty prisons, employees already trained in amendments, access to Alexandria Airport with detention facilities and history of deportation flights.
And attorneys say there are some of the country’s most conservative immigration judges and, in the case of immigrants, there are federal appeals courts that are often on the side of the government, lawyers say.
“Louisiana already had infrastructure,” said Homelo Lopez, legal director for immigration services and legal advocacy, a New Orleans-based immigration services and legal advocacy, a nonprofit that offers free representation. “Ice comes to say, ‘Everything has space. We have people. We’ll pay you twice what the state was paying.” That’s why it expanded so quickly. ”
Rural communities in Louisiana provided the benefits of ice
Many Americans know Louisiana in Crown Jewel, New Orleans, a state tourism mecca with just as social norms and politics as the flow of alcohol on Bourbon Street.
However, Louisiana is largely wooded, rural, proudly conservative and deeply Christian. The county government is called the parish and has the highest poverty rate in the country.
“People want jobs, and who blames them?” said Austin Cochel, an assistant research professor at Syracuse University who studies immigration enforcement. “It’s pretty easy to promise a job by establishing a detention facility.”
Country Louisiana made a living from oil and ingredients. Cutting trucks still ring around two-lane roads, with forested, but the decline in natural resources and prices has led some communities to look for new industries.
Prisons and current immigration detention bring good paying jobs and economic development to locations such as Winn, Huachita and LaSalle parishes.
Rasal was one of the first to see possibilities. In 2007, local leaders of the parish seat in Jena (currently the population of 4,155) wanted to diversify the economy. A vast juvenile detention facility north of town sat empty.
Local leaders welcomed the opportunity when Geo Group, the country’s largest private detention contractor, swooped into the ICE contract with him.
“The lack of needing to build an entirely new facility was probably a key element of what we’re located here,” said Craig Franklin, editor of the Weekly Jena Times. Furthermore, “Our advantage over a strong employee pool was probably a factor.”
The Wacheetah Diocese discussed whether to approve Mayor Richwood and the Council – Population 3,881 – ice detention contracts. Mayor Gerald Brown did not vote, but he said he supported conversion to ice custody.
“The Richwood Correctional Center is one of our biggest employers,” Brown told USA Today. “There was a lot of interaction. We did City Hall. We had a meeting.”
The town was standing to earn new income as an intermediary between ice and the private operator LaSalle correction. When it was prison, the town earned a fee of $112,000 a year. It has become an ice detention center, and the town earns around $412,000 a year.
“The economic blowout of the community was something I certainly couldn’t turn a blind eye,” Brown said.
Remote Ice Effects Detainees
The willingness of rural communities to house ice facilities is part of the draw to Louisiana, says researchers studying immigration detention.
Another factor: When ICE tries to open new detention centres near big cities, agents often encounter resistance from immigration rights activists and residents who have argued that it is “not my backyard.”
But the lawyers say that rural locations have real consequences for those detained.
Data shows that accessing lawyers dramatically improves detainees’ chances of release and staying in the US. However, it is difficult for lawyers to reach many facilities. Ahmed regularly drives 3-7 hours to visit immigrant clients across the state.
Baher Azmy, the legal director of the New York-based Constitutional Rights Center, represented Columbia University activist Halil during his more than three months of detention at the Central Louisiana Processing Center in Jena.
He visited twice and said he was attacked by its remoteness, the complete lack of space for lawyers to meet clients, and contactless family visits made behind the plexiglass.
After the court ordered it, accommodation was created for Halil to see his wife and newborn baby in another room.
“Getting there was a whole day suggestion,” Azumi said. It is a military prison on Cuba “reminiscent of an early trip to Guantanamo.” He represented clients accused of terrorism for several years after the 9/11 attacks. “Desolation, it’s difficult to get there. The visit conditions were better for Guantanamo than Jena. Guantanamo is so frightening, I can hug my clients.”
According to ICE, the rules and accommodations for various facilities may depend not only on contractual contracts but also on design and capabilities.
“All allegations that there are inappropriate conditions for ice detention facilities are explicitly false and designed to demonize ice law enforcement,” McLaughlin said. “ICE follows national detention standards.”
Exponential expansion of ice detention
The United States has consistently grown immigrant detention through both Republican and Democrat administrations.
However, the average number of immigrants in custody on a given day has risen rapidly over the past six months. From about 40,000 at the end of the Biden administration in January to more than 58,000 in early July.
Under President Joe Biden, Ice has moved thousands of migrants who sought asylum on the US-Mexican border to Louisiana Detention Centers, ACLU’s Ahmed said.
Today, the centre is full of people picked up inside the country.
Almost half of those who were in ice detention in early July had no criminal history or pending charges, according to ICE data. They faced civil immigration violations.
When determining whether to send detainees to Louisiana, ICE considers bed space, detainees’ medical and security needs and proximity to transportation, according to an agency statement.
The average daily population of Louisiana ice facilities exceeded 7,300 in early July. This is compared to about 2,000 ice detainees in 2017 at the start of the first Trump administration, according to data collected by Syracuse University TRAC.
Part of that increase comes from the Trump administration’s decision to withdraw legal status from thousands of immigrants who arrived during the Biden administration and subsequently followed the rules.
“These are mothers. These are children. These are students. And these are individuals who often had a very legal status, and they were taken away by the government,” Ahmed said. “So what we’re looking at is a rendering of people that have not been documented by US government pen strokes.”
Three times this spring and early summer, I moved to Richwood Corrections to visit my colleague Petrova, a Russian Harvard scientist. He said the building looked “a uncharacteristic beige building, like a warehouse.”
During his visit, most of the people he spoke to in nearby towns of Monroe knew that over 700 immigrant women were in local detention. On average, 97% of women with Richwood Correction had no criminal history in July, according to ICE data.
“If they’re being held without a fee,” he asked.
Lauren Villagran can be accessed at lvillagran@usatoday.com.
Dinah Pulver contributed to this report.
