Big businesses behind Louisiana’s ice detention
Many rural Louisiana communities rely on prison economies, including immigration detention centers, to maintain their livelihoods.
The Trump administration plans to detain immigrants in the largest security prison in the country. This is a Louisiana lockup that has a notorious history as a “Prison Plantation.”
Louisiana has played a key role in federal immigration enforcement for many years as the state with the second highest number of ice detention centers outside of Texas. The Louisiana prison – better known as Angola – is set to become the state’s 10th ice detention site.
On September 3, the top Trump administration will meet Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry outside a 6,300-bed prison located two hours northwest of New Orleans on Bend on the Mississippi River.
According to a study by Justin Hosbay at the University of California, prisons emerged from the integration of four plantations in the late 1800s.
An academic article in the Department of Justice’s own virtual library calls Angola a “prison farm.”
The agreement between US immigration, customs enforcement and Louisiana reflects a similar deal on immigration detention between Republican-led states and the Trump administration. They include the now shy “Crocodile Alcatraz” detention camp in the Florida Everglades and 1,000 beds in an Indiana correctional facility.
“Alligator Alcatraz” has “an obscure and despicable circumstances,” Democrats say.
Democratic leaders took a tour of Alligator Alcatraz, a Florida immigration detention facility. They called the condition “terrifying.”
ICE officials said they are attempting to secure 80,000 new immigration detention beds at existing prison facilities and military bases above the 41,500 immigration detention beds already within the system as part of a massive expansion of immigration detention.
This summer, Congress provided $45 billion to ice to pay it. According to the American Council on Immigration, there were three times more war breasts than the agency had previously had for detention.
Angola is well known not only for its history but also for its present day.
The prisoners sued the Louisiana prison system in 2023 on conditions known in Angola as “farm line.” There, inmates were forced to work the fields under the careful eyes of armed guards. Last year, a federal judge ordered prisons to introduce more protections to protect prisoners in extreme heat.
Homeland Security Secretary Christy Noem, Attorney General Pam Bondi and Associate Director Ice Madison Xiahan are scheduled to tour Angola prison on September 3rd.
DHS did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
ICE currently holds a record 61,226 immigration detention cases in more than 190 facilities nationwide, according to an analysis of detention data by Syracuse University immigration researcher Austin Cochel.
The largest use of security prisons to detain immigrants “promotes the administration’s big lie that people in immigrant detention are “criminals,” Louisiana ACLU’s Legal Affairs Director Nora Ahmed told USA Today. “Many people who come to this country are trying to follow the legal pathways we’ve put in place, but they’re still in custody.”
The most recent data shows that almost half of people in ice detention (45% (45%) have no criminal history or pending claims. As ICE holds immigrants on suspicion of civil violations of immigration law, institutional standards require that detention be “non-medical” or not punished.
This is a developing story.
