JENA, La. (AP) — Amid rural Louisiana’s crawfish farms, towering pine trees and cafes serving po’boys, nearly 7,000 people are waiting at immigration detention centers to learn whether they will be expelled from the United States.
If President Donald Trump’s administration has its way, the capacity to hold tens of thousands more migrants will soon be added around the country as the U.S. seeks an explosive expansion of what is already the world’s largest immigration detention system.
Trump’s effort to conduct mass deportations as promised in the 2024 campaign represents a potential bonanza for private prison companies and a challenge to the government agencies responsible for the orderly expulsion of immigrants. Some critics say the administration’s plans also include a deliberate attempt to isolate detainees by locking them up and holding court proceedings far from their attorneys and support systems.
The acting director of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, Todd Lyons, said at a border security conference in Phoenix last week that the agency needs “to get better at treating this like a business” and suggested the nation’s deportation system could function “like Amazon, trying to get your product delivered in 24 hours.”
“So trying to figure out how to do that with human beings and trying to get them pretty much all over the globe is really something for us,” Lyons said.
ICE takes steps to add more immigration beds
This month, ICE invited companies to bid on contracts to operate detention centers at sites around the country for up to $45 billion as the agency begins to scale up from its current budget for about 41,000 beds to 100,000 beds.
The money isn’t yet there, but contracts are already being awarded. The House narrowly approved a broad spending bill that includes $175 billion for immigration enforcement, about 22 times ICE’s annual budget. The agency’s 100-plus detention centers nationwide currently hold about 46,000 people, causing overcrowding in locations including Miami.
ICE last week awarded a contract worth up to $3.85 billion to Deployed Resources LLC to operate a detention camp at the Fort Bliss Army base in Texas. The little-known company is shifting its business from Border Patrol tent encampments for people arriving in the United States — most of which are now closed — to ICE facilities for people being deported.
The Geo Group Inc. got a contract for 1,000 beds in Newark, New Jersey, valued at $1 billion over 15 years and another for 1,800 beds in Baldwin, Michigan. CoreCivic Inc., won a contract to house 2,400 people in families with young children in Dilley, Texas, for five years.
The stock market has rewarded both of these private corrections companies. Geo’s stock price has soared 94% since Trump was elected. Shares of CoreCivic have surged 62%.
Louisiana ranks No. 2 in the nation in immigration detention space
Louisiana, which has relatively few immigrants and doesn’t border Mexico, may not seem like an obvious choice to establish an immigration detention hub. But circumstances converged toward the end of the last decade that allowed ICE to take over five former criminal jails in the state in 2019 alone.
Now the state is second only to Texas in the amount of bed space it offers for detained immigrants. ICE was drawn to the state in part by relatively low labor costs, a generally favorable political environment and a ready supply of recently emptied jails.
State laws in 2017 lowered criminal penalties, reducing the need for jail and prison beds. In rural areas, where a corrections facility is often a main driver of the local economy, officials were eager to sign contracts for immigration detention.
“Because Louisiana was a top incarcerator in the world, it’s not as though you have local legislators who are against prisons or against having a for-profit prison industrial complex come in and actually ensure that these continue to run,” said Nora Ahmed, legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Louisiana.
Conservative federal courts in the Western District of Louisiana and at the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals make it tougher for people in Louisiana immigration jails to challenge detention conditions or to appeal immigration court rulings, said Mary Yanik, a professor and co-director of the Immigrant Rights Clinic at Tulane University Law School.
“ICE gets to choose, basically, the courts where their cases are heard by locating detention centers in particular places,” she said.
Detention centers are often hours away from cities and lawyers
Louisiana’s nine immigration detention centers are in the rural north or western parts of the state. That means a drive of several hours from its largest cities, where immigration advocates and lawyers are clustered. Detainees have long complained of isolation.
Being held in “deplorable conditions” and isolated from their families and support networks can cause people to stop fighting their deportation and make it easier for ICE to remove them, said Carly Pérez Fernández, spokesperson for Detention Watch Network, which helped organize nationwide protests against ICE detention on Thursday.
“Detention really plays a crucial role in enabling Trump’s cruel mass deportation agenda,” she said. ”Increased detention capacity will exacerbate the detention conditions that we already know are inhumane.”
Most detention facilities are a relatively short distance from Alexandria, where ICE converted a former military base into a 400-bed, short-term holding center with an adjacent airstrip for deportation flights.
One facility is in Jena, which is home to 4,200 people, about 220 miles (355 kilometers) from New Orleans. The community has only a single advertised hotel called the Townsmen Inn.
The Jena detention center, operated under contract with the Geo Group, is surrounded by “no trespassing” signs, fencing with layers of razor wire and armed guards.
Homero Lopez, a lawyer at Immigration Services and Legal Advocacy, which provides free representation in Louisiana detention centers, said the faraway location “makes it a lot more difficult to protest and organize.”
The introduction of video links for immigration court has softened — but not eliminated — criticism that ICE is deliberately trying to distance detainees from their families, attorneys and other forms of support.
Lopez said he’s happy to use video conferencing for quick preliminary matters, but he prefers to make the drive to appear in person for substantive hearings. He said video links can be “dehumanizing” and may lead judges to fail to appreciate what’s at stake when they are not facing immigrants in person.
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Brumback reported from Atlanta. Associated Press writer Elliot Spagat in San Diego contributed to this report.
