Louisiana, long known for its ‘prison economy,’ now houses more ICE detention facilities than any other non-border state.
The big business behind ICE detention in Louisiana
Many communities in rural Louisiana depend on a prison economy, including immigrant detention centers, to sustain their livelihoods.
WINN PARISH, LA – Far from the jazz clubs and nightlife of New Orleans, thousands await their fate inside immigration jails.
Louisiana has more dedicated Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention centers than any other state besides Texas – nine total – after it converted nearly half a dozen correctional facilities to immigrant detention. Most are remote, scattered near farms and forests. Among the sites is a unique “staging facility” on a rural airport tarmac for rapid deportations.
President Donald Trump is increasingly leaning on Republican-led Southern states to detain and deport millions of immigrants ‒ from “Alligator Alcatraz” in the Florida Everglades to the expansion of a sprawling Georgia immigration facility. Far from the U.S.-Mexico border, Mississippi has the ICE jail with the highest average daily population.
But Louisiana was the first non-border state to surge immigration detention capacity, according to the American Civil Liberties Union of Louisiana and Tulane University Law School. The state opened five new facilities to detain immigrants in 2019, during the first Trump administration, and vastly expanded the number of detainees during the Biden administration.
Immigrants are sent here from all over the country, far from their families, communities and, often, their lawyers.
The Trump administration has confined some of its highest-profile detainees in Louisiana, including now-released Columbia University activist Mahmoud Khalil and Harvard University scientist Kseniia Petrova.
The state’s largest immigration jail, Winn Correctional Center, is tucked deep into dense pine woods nearly five hours northwest of New Orleans. The site is so remote that, for years, online maps routinely sent visitors the wrong way down a dirt road. A warning sign cautions visitors: “This property is utilized for the training of chase dogs.”
Other states might follow Louisiana’s example as more federal funds flow to ICE detention. Congress recently authorized the Trump administration to spend $45 billion over the next four years to expand immigration jails around the country. That’s nearly four times ICE’s previous annual detention budget.
USA TODAY traveled to four of Louisiana’s nine ICE facilities, hoping to see firsthand what life is like for immigrants detained there. But the Department of Homeland Security and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement denied multiple requests for a tour of any of the locations.
In an emailed statement, DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said ICE originally expanded its detention capacity in Louisiana “to address the increasing number of individuals apprehended at the border” under the Biden administration.
“ICE continues to explore all options to meet its current and future detention requirements while removing detainees as quickly as possible from the U.S.,” she said.
Nora Ahmed, legal director of the ACLU of Louisiana, described the state as key to Trump’s promised mass deportation campaign.
“Louisiana really is the epicenter for a lot of what is currently taking place with this administration,” Ahmed said. “It’s an outcropping of a prison economy that Louisiana has survived on for a long, long time.”
Deportation hub far from the border
Louisiana found its foothold as a deportation hub at the end of Trump’s first term, when the administration was looking to expand immigrant detention.
The state had reformed its criminal justice system in 2017, with bipartisan support, to reduce sentences for low-level offenders. That had the effect of dramatically decreasing the state’s prison population and freeing thousands of incarcerated people – mainly Black men and women.
At the time, the Black imprisonment rate was nearly four times the rate of White imprisonment in Louisiana, according to the ACLU.
Louisiana eventually rolled back the reforms. But racial justice activists briefly celebrated a win.
Then ICE came knocking.
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 corrections, and access to the Alexandria airport with a detention facility and a history of deportation flights.
It also has some of the country’s most conservative immigration judges, as well as a federal appeals court that, in immigration cases, often sides with the government, lawyers say.
“Louisiana had the infrastructure already there,” said Homero López, legal director of New Orleans-based Immigration Services and Legal Advocacy, a nonprofit that provides free representation. “ICE comes in saying, ‘Y’all have got the space. We’ve got the people. We’ll pay you double what the state was paying.’ That’s why the expansion was so fast.”
Louisiana’s rural communities offered advantages for ICE
Many Americans know Louisiana by its crown jewel, New Orleans, the state’s tourism mecca, where social norms and politics are as liberal as the flow of alcohol on Bourbon Street.
But Louisiana is largely wooded, rural, proudly conservative and deeply Christian. County governments are called parishes and the poverty rate is the highest in the nation.
“People want jobs and who’s to blame them?” said Austin Kocher, a Syracuse University research assistant professor who studies immigration enforcement. “It’s fairly easy to promise jobs by setting up a detention facility.”
Rural Louisiana used to make a living from oil and timber. Logging trucks still rumble down forested two-lane roads, but the decline in natural resources and price unpredictability drove some communities to look for new industries.
Prisons and now immigration detention deliver good-paying jobs and economic development to places like Winn, Ouachita and LaSalle parishes.
LaSalle was one of the first to see the potential. In 2007, local leaders in the parish seat of Jena – current population 4,155 – wanted to diversify the economy. A sprawling juvenile detention facility north of town sat empty.
When GEO Group, the nation’s largest private detention contractor, swooped in with an ICE contract in hand, local leaders welcomed the opportunity.
“Not having to build an entirely new facility was probably a key factor to them locating here,” said Craig Franklin, editor of the weekly Jena Times. Plus, “our advantage to a strong employee pool was likely a factor.”
In Ouachita Parish, the mayor and council of Richwood ‒ population 3,881 ‒ debated whether to approve an ICE detention contract. Mayor Gerald Brown didn’t have a vote, but he supported the conversion to ICE detention, he said.
“Richwood Correctional Center is one of our biggest employers,” Brown told USA TODAY. “There was a lot of back and forth. We did town halls, and we had meetings.”
The town stood to gain new income as an intermediary between ICE and the private operator, LaSalle Corrections. When it was a jail, the town earned a $112,000 a year fee. Now that it’s an ICE detention center, the town is getting about $412,000 a year.
“The financial windfall for the community was something I certainly couldn’t turn a blind eye to,” Brown said.
Remote ICE has consequences for the detained
The willingness of rural communities to house ICE facilities is part of the draw to Louisiana, researchers who study immigration detention say.
Another factor: When ICE tries to open new detention centers near big cities, the agency is often met with resistance from immigrant rights activists and residents with “not in my backyard” arguments.
But attorneys say the rural locations have real consequences for the people detained.
Data shows that having access to an attorney dramatically improves a detainee’s chance of winning release and a chance at staying in the United States. But it’s hard for attorneys to get to many of the facilities; Ahmed regularly drives three to seven hours to visit immigrant clients across the state.
Baher Azmy, legal director of the New York-based Center of Constitutional Rights, represented Khalil, the Columbia University activist, during his more than three-month detention at the Central Louisiana Processing Center in Jena.
He visited twice and said he was struck by its remoteness, the utter lack of space for attorneys to meet their clients and the no-contact family visitation conducted behind plexiglass.
Accommodations were made for Khalil to see his wife and newborn baby in a separate room, after a court ordered it.
“Getting there was an all-day proposition,” Azmy said. “It reminded me of my early trips to Guantanamo,” the military jail on the island of Cuba, where he represented clients accused of terrorism in the years after the 9/11 attacks. “The desolation, the difficulty getting there. The visiting conditions were better in Guantanamo than in Jena. As horrible as Guantanamo was, I could hug my client.”
According to ICE, rules and accommodations at different facilities can depend on their design and capacity, as well as contractual agreements.
“Allegations that ICE detention facilities have improper conditions are unequivocally 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 its immigration detention through both Republican and Democratic administrations.
But the average number of immigrants in detention on any given day has risen rapidly over the past six months, from roughly 40,000 people at the end of the Biden administration in January to more than 58,000 in early July.
Under President Joe Biden, ICE moved thousands of migrants who sought asylum at the United States-Mexico border over to Louisiana detention centers, said the ACLU’s Ahmed.
Now, the centers are filled with people picked up in the country’s interior.
Nearly half of those in ICE detention in early July had no criminal record or pending charges, according to ICE data. They faced civil immigration violations.
When determining whether to send a detainee to Louisiana, ICE considers bed space availability, the detainee’s medical and security needs and proximity to transportation, according to an agency statement.
The average daily population in Louisiana ICE facilities topped 7,300 in early July. That compares to roughly 2,000 ICE detainees in 2017 at the start of the first Trump administration, according to data collected by TRAC at Syracuse University.
Some of that increase is due to a Trump administration decision to withdraw legal status from thousands of immigrants who arrived during the Biden administration and followed the rules then in place.
“These are mothers. These are children. These are students. And these are individuals who often had status that was very much legal, that’s then been taken away by the administration,” Ahmed said. “So what we are seeing is the rendering of documented people to undocumented by the stroke of a pen of the United States government.”
Three times this spring and early summer, Will Trim traveled to Richwood Correctional to visit his colleague Petrova, the Harvard scientist from Russia. He said the buildings looked “like warehouses, featureless beige buildings” encircled with razor wire, separated from a low-income neighborhood by a patch of woods.
During his visits, few of the people he spoke with in the nearby town of Monroe knew that more than 700 immigrant women were being held locally. According to ICE data, on average, in July, 97% of the women in Richwood Correctional had no criminal record.
“If they are being held without charge,” he asked, “why is there double-barbed wire? Why is it hidden in the forest?”
Lauren Villagran can be reached at lvillagran@usatoday.com.
Dinah Pulver contributed to this report.
