Press, civil rights activists and a few other potential spectators fought their way into a small immigration courtroom in the town of Jena last Friday.
The object of everyone’s interest was Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University graduate student and pro-Palestinian campus activist, who was arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in New York City and eventually transported to the Central Louisiana ICE Processing Center, a privately run immigration detention center in La Salle Parish.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio labeled Khalil a threat to U.S. foreign policy interests due to his support for pro-Palestinian protests, which Rubio described as "antisemitic." The judge ruled Friday that Khalil can be deported, stating she had no authority to challenge Rubio’s determination.
Khalil’s detention in Louisiana, along with that of several other campus activists who have been shipped to detention centers in the state from far away, has put a spotlight on Louisiana’s role as a major hub for immigration detention.
Louisiana doesn’t just have its own “Cancer Alley”; it also is part of what researchers at the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University, a longstanding authority on immigration data analysis, have coined “Detention Center Alley.”
While ICE has expanded its detention efforts to a greater number of facilities across the country since the start of the second Trump administration, Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi remain primary destinations for immigrants detained by federal law enforcement and processed for potential deportation.
Altogether, 20 facilities of varying sizes located in the three states hold 59% of ICE’s detained population on any given day, according to TRAC.
It’s worth noting that this data is based on the final release made by the federal government during the Biden administration, but daily census numbers suggest the role of those facilities as major centers for immigration detention hasn’t changed.
While the Biden administration promised to end the use of private detention facilities — almost all detention facilities used by ICE in Louisiana are operated by private, for profit companies — this didn’t happen, and the state remained a major hub for immigration detention.
As of March 17, Louisiana remains the state with the second largest immigrant detainee population in the country after Texas. This is notable especially because, unlike Texas, the percentage of Louisiana residents who are immigrants is exceptionally low.
Although the number of people who were born abroad and now living in Louisiana has doubled since 2000, in line with a general trend of increasing immigrant populations in many parts of the country, only 4.9% of the state’s population is immigrants, compared to 17.9% in Texas.
As a result, in many Louisiana towns, some of the only immigrants are those incarcerated in the local detention facilities, which means detainees can make up a significant portion of the population.
The village of Pine Prairie, for example, has a population of 1,490, according to the 2020 Census, although local officials believe the true number to be closer to 1,100 residents and assume detainees of the local Pine Prairie ICE Processing Center were counted as part of that total population.
Inmates in prisons, jails and immigration detention centers are customarily counted as part of the local population on census day, although it’s unclear whether “processing facilities” fall into that category.
In recent years, population at the Pine Prairie center had been cut roughly in half to between 200-350 detainees amid plans to close the privately run facility, prompted by years of complaints from civil rights advocates and Department of Homeland Security inspections that found a litany of deficiencies related to the facility and its ability to care for detainees.
That closure, scheduled for the end of 2023, never happened. Instead, the center again holds more than 600 detainees as of March 17, nearly half as many people as are estimated to live in the town.
This trend is in line with a ballooning detainee population under President Donald Trump. As of March 23, there were a total of 47,892 people in ICE detention, according to TRAC, with thousands detained in Louisiana.