From the blocks of Angola State Penitentiary to the detention wings of ICE, Louisiana has long been in the business of caging human beings. Now, with the federal deportation machine accelerating, the state is leaning fully into its newest carceral frontier: immigration detention. The same cages (and new ones on the way), the same profiteers, the same isolation and abuse. In Louisiana, if you build the beds, they’ll find reasons to fill them, and keep them filled, fueling a sprawling detention network that depends on high occupancy, low oversight, and maximum disposability.
Louisiana locks up more people per capita than nearly any other state in the U.S., and unlike elsewhere, a majority of those incarcerated are held in local jails, with the state paying sheriffs a daily rate to warehouse them. As prison populations ballooned through the ’90s and early 2000s, some sheriffs outsourced state “prisoners” to private operators like GEO Group and LaSalle Corrections, embedding profit deeper into punishment. Even modest reforms, like Governor John Bel Edwards’ 2017 Justice Reinvestment Initiative (JRI) legislation that reduced the state prison population by more than 8,000 people, didn’t shrink the system. It simply shifted. ICE arrests surged under Trump, and Louisiana, with its existing infrastructure, became the easy answer. No resistance. No regulation. Just rural towns desperate for jobs and politicians eager to oblige.
Making matters worse is that legal resources have grown leaner as the need has grown. Last June, Southern Poverty Law Center laid off 35 immigration lawyers in the region while shutting down their work on immigration detention. This January, amidst cuts to federal programs, Immigration Services and Legal Advocacy (ISLA) lost funding to represent unaccompanied children in detention (many who were seeking asylum). With no right to an attorney in immigration proceedings, nonprofits are typically the only chance someone has to get due process under law.
The New York Times released “How Louisiana Built Trump’s Busiest Deportation Hub,” a chilling exposé and video tracing the deportation pipeline to its unlikely hub at the center of the state: Alexandria International Airport. A former U.S. Air Force base, AEX now serves as the top transit site for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Most Americans have never heard of it. But tucked into central Louisiana, it’s become the nation’s busiest ICE flight hub, launching deportation flights almost daily to Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, and beyond. What looks like a sleepy regional airport is, in reality, the front door of a deportation superhighway.
And it’s no coincidence. Within an hour’s drive of Alexandria are at six ICE detention centers, most run by private prison giants like GEO Group and LaSalle Corrections. One federal official described it plainly: “ICE wants to operate like FedEx or Amazon.” In Louisiana, they can without friction—because there’s already a punishment infrastructure and economy here, designed to profit from human confinement. In fact, the daily cost of holding an ICE detainee in Louisiana is roughly one-third the cost elsewhere. Cheap land. Cheap labor. No pushback. No accident.
Just up the road in Jena, the region’s largest ICE detention facility, the Central Louisiana ICE Processing Center, cages over 1,100 people daily. Once a juvenile prison, it’s now operated by GEO Group and plugged into a vast, profit-driven incarceration network. Its economic impact is significant: providing 250 jobs and generating nearly $1 million in tax revenue. Like many small Louisiana towns, Jena’s survival is increasingly tied to a disturbing dependence on human warehousing.
But Jena has also become a national flashpoint. In March 2025, ICE detained Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia student and pro-Palestinian activist, and flew him over 1,000 miles to Jena, separating him from his family and legal team, and placing him deep in rural obscurity. His arrest sparked a national outcry, drawing thousands into action: petitions, protests, media campaigns, and even a Congressional delegation. In May, over 500 people marched in Jena, calling for Khalil’s release and an end to ICE’s repression of political dissent. Representatives toured the facility, calling Khalil’s conditions “shocking,” and condemning the weaponization of detention against student activists and immigrants alike. And still, for those left behind, nothing changed.
This isn’t the first time Jena made national headlines. Nearly two decades ago, the Jena Six case ignited national outrage after Black high school students were charged with attempted murder for a schoolyard fight, just months after nooses were hung from a tree on campus. The case exposed deep racial bias in Louisiana’s legal system and drew tens of thousands to protest. Today, a new battle is unfolding in the same town, this time over immigration detention and the criminalization of dissent. A new generation is carrying that legacy forward, confronting not just racial injustice, but the machinery of surveillance, silence, and state-sanctioned exile.
Meanwhile, conditions inside these facilities remain dire. The ACLU’s August 2024 report “Inside the Black Hole: Systemic Rights Abuses Against Immigrants Detained & Disappeared in Louisiana” takes a deep look into the state’s abyss and confirmed what people inside have long said: abuse, medical neglect, solitary confinement, contaminated food, and retaliation for speaking out are routine. Many of the detained have lived in the U.S. for decades. Some are asylum seekers. Others are residents facing minor charges. But inside ICE’s shadow prison network, they are all reduced to one thing: deportable—and profitable.
Let’s be clear: Louisiana is not just complicit. We are leading. We operate 9 of ICE’s 131 detention facilities nationwide, more than any other state, with over 8,000 people locked in ICE custody at any given time. We’ve built a deportation pipeline that stretches from local jails to federal courtrooms to the belly of a plane. Every new contract signed, every old prison repurposed, every deportation flight launched from Alexandria, deepens that pipeline.
And yet, resistance is growing. People are connecting the dots, between incarceration and deportation, between Palestine and Louisiana, between Jena and global struggles for dignity. The question now is: Will we keep letting Louisiana disappear people for hollow profits that serve the few, at the cost of our humanity and tax dollars? Or will we rise to dismantle the cages—in all their forms?
Watch: New York Times, How Louisiana Became ICE Detention Central