Several of the recent high-profile cases of immigrant detention have something in common. The Columbia University activist Mahmoud Khalil, the University of Alabama engineering doctoral candidate Alireza Doroudi, the Tufts graduate student Rumeysa Ozturk and the young scientist Kseniia Petrova were rounded up in their states and sent to detention centers in Louisiana.
It is no coincidence that they all were sent to the same state — a place where they are far from their families, communities and legal counsel. Louisiana has for years been a hot spot of America’s immigrant detention, and the second Trump administration is using the state to its advantage in its effort to strip immigrants of their rights and to do so in a way that is largely hidden from public view.
Our state has nine Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention centers, including a staging facility, with a capacity to hold more than 7,000 people, second only to Texas in the number of beds assigned to the task. Like Mr. Khalil, Mr. Doroudi, Ms. Ozturk and Ms. Petrova, thousands of immigrants arrested around the country have been transferred to these Louisiana jails in recent decades.
Louisiana is notorious for a trifecta of compounding barriers to effectuate the rights of immigrants: conservative courts, scarce access to legal support and horrific detention conditions. The resulting black hole, as civil and human rights groups have called it, threatens to erode America’s rule of law well beyond the immigration legal system.
This dates back to 1986 when an immigrant detention center was established in Oakdale, La., with 1,000 beds. During President Trump’s first term, eight local jails and old state prisons were converted into immigration detention centers in the wake of statewide criminal justice reforms that reduced the prison population. Nearly overnight, the number of beds in the state warehousing immigrants more than tripled. The Biden administration largely maintained this vast system as part of the ongoing border crackdown.
Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi hold more than half of the country’s detained immigrants; immigration researchers call the stretch Detention Alley. These three states and their immigration courts fall under the Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, the most conservative federal circuit in the nation, known for anti-immigrant jurisprudence. Transferring immigrants from more progressive jurisdictions allows immigration officials to effectively shop for their courts.
Immigrants detained in Louisiana face antagonistic judges for virtually every type of legal claim: in seeking release from detention, in arguing for the right to stay in the United States and in appealing any unfavorable ruling. Lower court judges sitting in what are known as detained immigration courts — there are two such courts in Louisiana, one in Oakdale and the other in Jena — deny more than three out of four asylum claims, according to available data. If immigrants challenge their detention as unconstitutional, they generally must file in the Western District of Louisiana, a Federal District Court that from 2010 to 2020 ordered release in only 1 percent of such cases.
Immigration lawyers are scarce not just in remote areas of Louisiana, where detention centers are found; they’re also hard to find in New Orleans and Baton Rouge. A vast majority of detained immigrants across the country attempt to represent themselves, with little success; as slim as their odds are, detained immigrants with a lawyer are at least twice as likely to win their case as detained immigrants without representation.
Even those who secure a lawyer often have trouble arranging legal visits and phone calls. And according to one lawsuit, immigration and jail officials interrupted attorney-client visits, intimidated lawyers, trapped them for hours inside a facility and followed them off the property.
The conditions in Louisiana immigration facilities are punishing. A great majority of immigrant detention centers in Louisiana, as is the case nationally, are run by private corporations intent on turning profits. A 2024 report by the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights organization documented a litany of abuses, from brown water and food infested with maggots to sexual assault, liberal use of tear gas and dozens of instances of denied medical care. Those who complained faced retaliation, including months of solitary confinement.
These conditions have contributed to the deaths of eight people detained in Louisiana in the past five years, according to the same report. Some scholars and advocates have speculated that these conditions are meant to deter people from pursuing their legal claims to remain in the United States, forcing them to give up, even when facing possible violence in the country to which they would be deported.
In 2021 a BuzzFeed News investigation uncovered an internal memo written by the Department of Homeland Security’s Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties recommending that one notorious Louisiana detention center be “drawn down to zero” in light of “conditions that can lead to abuse, mistreatment and discrimination.” The facility, Winn Correctional, remains open, with a daily population of about 1,500 people. The Trump administration has since shuttered the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties.
Advocates for immigrants have gotten U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to end its contracts with a handful of detention centers over the past five years. One group, Southeast Dignity Not Detention Coalition, aims to replicate those successes in Louisiana.
The human rights abuses perpetrated in these facilities reverberate well beyond the state and beyond immigrant communities, undermining our understanding of due process for all. When government officials and powerful private forces are allowed to create legal black holes and act with impunity to shield their actions, everyone’s right to liberty and justice is threatened.
Laila Hlass and Mary Yanik are immigration law professors at Tulane Law School and the authors of “No End in Sight: Prolonged and Punitive Immigration Detention in Louisiana.”
