We, the staff and leadership of Voice of the Experienced (VOTE), are based in Louisiana, a state built on stolen land and forced labor. We are led by people who have lived through incarceration and its long shadow. Our families, our histories, and our bodies carry the marks of systems built to control, extract, and disappear people deemed disposable.
What we are witnessing with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in Louisiana and across the country is not about public safety. It is state-sanctioned violence.
Policing, incarceration, detention and deportation are not separate systems. They are coordinated parts of the same machinery, designed to control, confine, and disappear people under the guise of law and order. It is the same punishment machine that has caged Black, poor and working-class people for generations, now accelerated and repackaged around a new target.
We are seeing this machinery operate in real time. ICE terror, aggressive policing, and large-scale immigrant detention are not isolated incidents. They are the strategy to implement ethnic cleansing. ICE is flooding communities with newly recruited agents lured by bonuses and fast placement, many with minimal training and unchecked authority over people’s lives. These agents implement brazen racial targeting, and sweeps moving from city to city, from New Orleans to Chicago to Minneapolis. They raid homes and businesses without warrants and are armed to the teeth. They escalate traffic stops into violence and arrest. Their deployment is often accompanied by the National Guard.
Communities are being openly terrorized. Our neighbors are being hunted and kidnapped from neighborhoods, workplaces, schools, and immigration proceedings. Families are being driven into hiding and forced to withdraw from daily life. Children have stopped going to school. People are now avoiding hospitals, jobs, and public spaces altogether. Witnesses and protestors to this rising authoritarianism have been met with state-sanctioned intimidation, violence, and lethal force. We are being told not to believe what we are seeing with our own eyes.
This is not public safety. This is abusive state power that is disappearing people in plain sight, enforced through fear, force, and violence.
Louisiana sits at the center of this machinery not because this state has more immigrants, but because it already had the carceral machinery to exploit. For generations, Louisiana has built an economy around punishment and a business out of cages. When the language shifts from “war on drugs” to “tough on crime” to “immigrant detention and deportation,” the violence always stays the same. When the state takes your body, cages you, moves you far from your people, and controls your future without your consent, that is the American carceral system. The words change. The harm does not.
In 2017, the Justice Reinvestment Initiative was passed to reduce the Louisiana prison population. It worked. Thousands of prison beds were cleared and millions of taxpayer dollars were saved. That should have meant closing prisons. Instead, empty beds became an invitation. The state went looking for a new market and new people to fill it. First, they brought people from other states. Now they are filling those same beds with our immigrant brothers and sisters. Louisiana has a history of doing this: the immigration detention center at Jena was once a juvenile detention center.
Federal enforcement chose Louisiana because the state’s jail and prison network could be repurposed to serve an expanding deportation regime. The 1,600-bed Winn Correctional Center in Winnfield, once a state prison, now operates as one of the largest ICE detention facilities in the country. Alexandria has become a major deportation hub, with routine deportation flights leaving from a regional airport few people ever think about. ICE has proposed building massive detention facilities on the Northshore, designed to fast-track deportations at scale, treating human beings like inventory in a warehouse.
Immigration enforcement has never been about safety. It has always been about profit and control. Federal custody of immigrants pays more than state custody of incarcerated people, so sheriffs, politicians, and private prison companies chase “capacity” and “infrastructure.” Through 287(g) agreements, now spreading across Louisiana, local law enforcement become deputized as immigration agents, and are rewarded financially for feeding people into the deportation pipeline. Taxpayer dollars are used, with interest, to build cages, locking future generations into debt while schools, healthcare, and coastal restoration are left to collapse. Every bed in this system is a business decision. Every transfer is a contract. Every expansion is a choice.
We see the consequences up close. Look at East Baton Rouge Parish Prison, people are over incarcerated, neglected, and have died in a jail meant for pretrial detention. That is why VOTE Baton Rouge Organizers launched the Unjustified campaign, to expose the human, financial, and moral costs of this system and fight for safety rooted in care, not punishment. Now they want to build that jail even bigger. Bigger does not mean safer. Bigger means more bodies, more neglect, more profit.
Look at Angola State Penitentiary, an 18,000-acre plantation prison. Camp J was its most notorious solitary and disciplinary unit, so brutal that even staff refused to work there. A federal judge declared it unconstitutional and uninhabitable, and it was shut down. Today, it has been repainted, renamed Camp 57, and reopened to hold “the worst of the worst” undocumented immigrants detained in the federal system. Same land. Same cages. New target.
From inside Angola, one man shares:
“Camp J, once a condemned property, is now being reopened for ICE to pack immigrants into the once infamous disciplinary camp… I don’t know how their medical needs will be met in a system already declared unconstitutional. This feels like a violation of both immigrants’ and prisoners’ civil liberties.”
This system survives by convincing us we are separate from another. That one group can be sacrificed to protect another. But we know the truth. When they build cages for one, they are building cages for all of us. Any system designed to disappear one group will always go looking for the next.
As formerly incarcerated people and their loved ones, we know that control does not end at the prison gate. Probation, parole, surveillance, rearrest. The form changes. The power does not. That is why we recognize this system wherever it shows up.
If you build a system to disappear people for profit, it will always need new people to take. If you build the cages, they will fill them.
Louisiana incarcerates more people than almost any other state. That also means Louisiana holds enormous collective power. More people who know this system. More families who have felt its harm. More communities ready to resist. VOTE calls this unification process ‘waking the sleeping giant’: When everyone touched by incarceration and state violence realizes our shared power, this system cannot stand.
The cage is the same.
And our liberation is tied together.
