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It’s a tactical move.
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All across the country, Immigration and Customs Enforcement has been arresting international students connected to last year’s college protests for Palestine, rescinding their visas, and initiating deportation proceedings. In at least four high-profile cases—those of Mahmoud Khalil, Rumeysa Ozturk, Badar Khan Suri and Alireza Doroudi—the Trump administration is fighting to keep them detained in Louisiana, a state with a notorious prison system. For years, Louisiana has held the second-highest incarceration rate in the world—second only to El Salvador, which the Trump administration is paying $6 million per year to detain people it deports. The state has also faced disturbing allegations of abuse.
Keeping deportation cases in Louisiana is a tactical move for the administration: It is home to many Trump-appointed district court judges, who are overseen by the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, the most far-right bench in the country. (Trump handpicked 6 of the 17 judges there during his first term.) In Khalil’s case, lawyers for the Department of Justice argued that only federal courts in Louisiana have jurisdiction because that’s where he is being detained. However, Khalil, who is a legal permanent resident, was first held in New Jersey. That is where his attorneys are based and where they filed a habeas petition challenging his detention; ICE later transferred him to Louisiana, where he’s been held since early March.
On April 1, U.S. District Judge Michael E. Farbiarz ruled that Khalil’s case should be heard in his New Jersey court. Ozturk, who was arrested in Massachusetts and transferred to multiple different detention centers until she reached Louisiana, is hoping for a similar ruling. A federal judge in Vermont is considering whether her case should be heard there or in Louisiana.
To understand why an administration keen on enforcing punitive immigration policies would see Louisiana as a haven, Slate spoke to two experts deeply familiar with the state’s prison system: Homero López, the legal director of Immigration Services and Legal Advocacy—the only nonprofit offering pro bono legal representation to detained immigrants in the entire state—and Mary Yanik, director of Tulane University’s Immigrant Rights Clinic.
Louisiana Has the Beds ICE Needs
Starting around 2010, there was a national wave of criminal justice reform, particularly in southern states like Georgia, Mississippi, and South Carolina. This wave took a little longer to reach Louisiana, but in 2017, criminal justice reform advocates partnered with a bipartisan group of state lawmakers to introduce 10 bills, which all eventually became law, which would reduce the maximum sentences for certain crimes and extend parole eligibility. Collectively, the legislation would help lower the state’s incarceration rate and help it save $262 million. By 2018, the state’s total prison population had dropped by about 8 percent, and the number of people imprisoned for nonviolent crimes decreased 20 percent.
Things took a sharp turn once Donald Trump arrived at the White House for his first term, armed with a plan to tighten U.S. immigration. “You’ve got a state that has this historical infrastructure of detaining and incarcerating people in these rural areas of Louisiana that are now emptying out and becoming available,” López said. “ICE doesn’t need to build anything new. They basically tell local sheriffs, ‘What if we take over? And we’ll pay you.’ ”
ICE ended up snapping up those newly emptied beds by offering lucrative contracts to Louisiana’s private prisons. (Almost all of Louisiana’s detention centers are privately owned.) By López’s estimate, in 2016 there were somewhere between 1,500 to 2,000 people total that were detained in Louisiana on any given day. By the end of 2019, that number had jumped up to between 7,000 and 8,000.
By 2019, the first Trump administration was detaining immigrants in Louisiana at a rate higher than any other state in the country besides Texas, Yanik and other researchers found. After Trump left office in 2020, the Biden administration continued to leverage the ICE contracts negotiated by the prior Trump administration for a similar purpose.
Detention Centers Are Isolated
“It’s worth saying that these facilities are extraordinarily remote,” Yanik noted. Many of Louisiana’s detention facilities are located at least two hours from Baton Rouge and three to five hours away from New Orleans. That distance creates multiple barriers for detainees, starting with being able to find a lawyer.
Many of the state’s attorneys work in or near Baton Rouge or New Orleans, so taking on an immigration detention case requires a lengthy commute—potentially for years, since immigration cases often take a while to resolve. The legal team for Khalil—a lawful permanent resident of the U.S. and a Columbia University graduate—is based in New York and New Jersey, and that is where he’s challenging the legality of his deportation order.
The isolating nature of Louisiana’s detention facilities also means detainees are far from their support network. López has also seen local activists struggle to assemble protests outside the detention centers, something that usually attracts attention—because of their remoteness, Louisiana’s detention facilities create an “out of sight, out of mind situation,” López said. He believes the administration is also trying to deter others through fear of that isolation.
Language access is also a significant barrier for people being detained in Louisiana. A report published last year by the American Civil Liberties Union, ISLA, and a number of other immigrant advocacy groups found that detainees were regularly denied interpretation and translation services, “resulting in language-related denials of medical and mental health care; due process in preparation of legal materials; and protection against abusive treatment and coercion.”
The Judiciary in Louisiana Is Stacked Against Immigrants
The federal courts in Louisiana have historically been “very anti-immigrant,” López said—and the state falls under the jurisdiction of the 5th Circuit, the most far-right federal appeals court in the country.
It’s advantageous for Trump’s agenda to have such a MAGA-friendly court ruling on appeals that stem from these cases. The hard-right Republican appointees on the 5th Circuit are unlikely to rule in favor of immigrants seeking to vindicate their rights against a GOP president. Even if a federal court grants a victory to an immigrant, the decision would likely be reversed on appeal. And under U.S. immigration law, there is no rule mandating where ICE must detain someone, giving the Trump administration latitude to, in effect, choose which federal courts will hear immigrants’ claims. “It’s not like you have to keep them within a certain radius of where you pick them up,” López said. This has enabled the Trump administration to arrest folks anywhere in the country but detain them in Louisiana, or any detention center it so chooses.
When an immigrant is challenging their detention, they must go through a series of different courts, starting with an immigration judge. This judge is a political appointee selected by the attorney general; they have no real independence—let alone life tenure like federal judges—and may only grant relief in a narrow set of circumstances. The Trump administration has recently gone on a spree of firing these immigration judges—including López, who had been appointed to an appellate immigration judgeship under the Biden administration.
While studying Louisiana’s immigration system, Yanik and her co-authors looked at about 500 habeas cases—a petition challenging a person’s detention—within the Western District of Louisiana between 2010 and 2020. They found immigration judges only ruled in favor of the detainee 1 percent of the time, resulting in their successful release. That translates to only five cases, three of which were during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic.
The Biden Administration Also Used Louisiana for Immigration Detention
After Trump left office, President Joe Biden continued to leverage the ICE contracts negotiated by the prior administration. “Aside from some indication that the Biden administration would reduce detention of at least one of Louisiana’s facilities,” Yanik explained, “they basically remained open and at or near capacity.”
In 2021, Biden signed an executive order mandating the DOJ to stop contracting with private prisons but made no mention of immigration detention; this omission effectively exempted immigrant detention centers from the ban, and the Biden administration continued to send noncitizens to these sites.
Last year, the ACLU along with López’s organization ISLA and other immigrant advocacy groups published “Inside the Black Hole,” a damning report about human rights abuses against immigrants in Louisiana’s prisons. “In some instances, the abuses that detained people describe firsthand in this report meet the definitions of torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment under international human rights treaties to which the United States is a party,” the report said.
Despite the different language that Republican and Democratic administrations use when speaking about immigration, López noted, “their actions, particularly when it comes to detention, tend to be pretty similar.” Though the rate of deportations under Trump isn’t all that different from the Biden administration’s, they’re targeting more legal permanent residents and those on lawful immigration parole. It’s indicative of the Trump administration deploying a shock-and-awe strategy to scare people into self-deporting and from trying to immigrate to the U.S. at all. “You can weaponize the system,” López said, “letting everybody else know: If you don’t fall in line, this is what comes next for you too.”
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