Louisiana Is the Place America Sends Immigrants to Disappear
More detention centers. More disappearances. More silence. Louisiana didn’t become the deportation capital by accident.
Louisiana has more immigrant detention centers than any other state in America, and that is not an accident. This is where ICE sends people to disappear. The buses arrive before sunrise, carrying men and women who have already been stripped of their names and their hope.
Their hearings are delayed for months, their transfers never end, and their families are left to search for them through a maze of phone numbers that don’t work and closed doors. Louisiana was built to make people vanish, and for years it has done exactly that.
In Louisiana, the cruelty is written into law. Immigrants are branded on their driver’s licenses, hunted by “fugitive task forces,” and denied justice if a driver hits them. It’s a prototype. The version of America the Trump administration dreams of.
But this system of abuse in Louisiana did not begin with Trump.
It was born out of silence, nurtured by profit, and finally expanded into an growing empire of cruelty under this administration.
“When they took us from the border, we were shackled, head to toe. Then they told us we were going to Louisiana. We all started shaking with fear. We knew we were about to lose our freedom, our rights, even our humanity. We knew we were going to the Black Hole.” — former detainee, ACLU Louisiana Report (2024)
The Black Hole
Louisiana is called an black hole because it holds ten ICE detention facilities — more than any other state — and those facilities have turned immigration into a weapon of disappearance. Behind its barbed wire and paperwork, abuse thrives in silence while the system swallows people whole.
Most of these ‘detention centers’ are operated by private prison companies such as GEO Group and LaSalle Corrections or by parish sheriffs under federal contracts.
Louisiana’s detention network includes: Alexandria Staging Facility, Allen Parish Public Safety Complex, Central Louisiana ICE Processing Center in Jena, Jackson Parish Correctional Center, Pine Prairie ICE Processing Center, Richwood Correctional Center, River Correctional Center, South Louisiana ICE Processing Center in Basile, and Winn Correctional Center in Winnfield. And now Angola Prison.
In 2025, a tenth site was added inside Angola Prison (aka Louisiana State Penitentiary) — one of the most violent and abusive prisons in America — where dozens of immigrants are now held in isolation, neglect, and fear.
Angola Prison stands on an 18,000-acre former slave plantation, its name taken from the homeland of the people once forced to labor there. After the Civil War, Louisiana turned Angola into a prison-plantation, keeping the same chain of exploitation alive. A place so abusive that prisoners slit their Achilles to protest the abuse and being forced to perform slave labor in the fields.
Since the 60s, Louisiana’s Angola Prison has run a rodeo where inmates — not cowboys — face charging bulls for the amusement of the free world. A rodeo you can still buy tickets to today.
A prison for everyone: U.S. Citizens, Immigrants, and, yes, even children.
A place where children are maced & beaten, the sick are denied care, and men without legs are locked in solitary as “escape risks.” One man repeatedly begged for help until a stroke left him blind and paralyzed.
It’s a prison long condemned for abuse and failure. But Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem called its “legendary” violent past part of the appeal, and Governor Jeff Landry bragged that it sits beside a lake “full of alligators” and a “forest full of bears.”
This is where they chose to cage immigrants. Many of which had fled to America in a desperate attempt to save their lives.
The story doesn’t end at Angola.
“Will I die in this jail, or will they deport me back to my death?” — former detainee, ACLU Louisiana Report (2024)
What the South Louisiana ICE Processing Center is Doing to Pregnant Women
In America, even pregnant women aren’t safe from ICE. The so-called “pro-life” party cries over embryos but looks away when immigrant women miscarry from abuse.
They don’t see immigrants as human — that’s why their cruelty never counts as murder to them. And knowing the administration wants to revoke birthright citizenship, this almost feels like it’s by design.
A woman named Alicia was taken to the detention center in Basile, Louisiana (South Louisiana ICE Processing Center), where she learned she was pregnant. The food made her sick. The water was dirty. When she started bleeding, guards ignored her until she collapsed.
At the hospital, she said doctors performed an invasive test on her without consent, and she miscarried. Instead of releasing her, ICE kept her locked up for two more months — feverish, bleeding, and terrified.
Another woman, Lucia, was left bleeding alone in a small room after guards refused to take her to a doctor for weeks. When they finally did, she was shackled hand and foot in the ambulance.
Another, Marie, was thrown into solitary confinement and denied prenatal vitamins. She watched another woman lose her baby in the bathroom.
And in Alexandria, Louisiana, there’s a place where people disappear.
It looks like an airport with a warehouse, but inside, it’s filled with men in shackles, sleeping shoulder to shoulder in rooms that smell like sweat and rust. The showers run brown when they work at all.
Guards laugh through the glass as people beg for medicine, food, or a chance to call their families.
The system’s core — its black box — is the Alexandria Staging Facility, where transfers never stop and oversight doesn’t exist. A staging facility is supposed to be temporary. It’s not allowed to hold people for more than 72 hours, but this one often does.
It’s a place that “just isn’t for human beings” according to former detainees. Local 911 records reveal a growing number of medical emergencies inside the facility — more calls for help than ever before.
“Louisiana is where people go to be disappeared. My concern about the Alexandria facility is that it is a black box. Visitors are not permitted, and it is the kind of place where mistakes can happen, giving officials a convenient excuse to wrongly deport people. The only way to stop that is for people to have access to attorneys.” — Nora Ahmed, Legal Director, ACLU of Louisiana
The Stories of Alexandria Staging Facility in Louisiana
Amilcar Lisser-Posadas, a father of two little girls who are U.S. citizens, was brought there shackled at his wrists and ankles. He’d been arrested in Tennessee for driving with an expired license. He had no criminal record. When he arrived, he was sick with a fever and chest congestion.
He said the guards ignored him. The water was filthy.
He was given no medicine until the last two days before he was deported. “They laughed,” he said, “when I asked why I was being held.”
On the flight that sent him away from his family, he saw children still in their school uniforms, women clutching their stomachs in late pregnancy, whole families crying quietly as the plane filled with the sound of shackles.
Baldomero Orozco-Juarez, a community leader and father, was taken next. ICE agents drove him 250 miles through the night from Mississippi to Alexandria — the only person in the back of a government SUV.
He was deported less than 24 hours later, before his lawyer could find him. “They made us walk slowly,” he said. “They laughed at the way we walked. The way we got on the plane. They treated us so badly.” His attorney called it a “targeted kidnapping.”
And then there was Badar Khan Suri, a postdoctoral scholar at Georgetown University with a valid visa. He was flown in from Virginia for allegedly criticizing Israel. In Alexandria, he was marched off a plane in shackles and locked in a windowless cell under constant lockdown.
He could hear his wife and children on the phone, but they couldn’t hear him. “Who is there?” they asked. “Can you hear me?”
He thought maybe they had been taken, too. He later said, “At that time, I realized there is nothing called rights. It was a real black hole. A real disgrace.”
These men never met each other. But their stories are the same.
Each was taken from a different part of the country, dropped in this warehouse by a runway, stripped of their dignity, and sent away before anyone could help them.
This isn’t a detention center. It’s a machine built to erase people — to make them vanish before the world can look.
What It All Adds Up To
These stories are not isolated incidents. They are the architecture of a system designed to function without witnesses, without mercy, and without accountability. And nowhere is that system more complete than in Louisiana.
A quiet empire of disappearance has been built, not by accident but by design. Behind barbed wire and bureaucratic fog, ICE has turned this state into America’s most efficient eraser of lives, where immigrants vanish into a maze of remote detention centers, sham hearings, and endless transfers.
From pregnant women miscarrying in solitary confinement to scholars jailed for their words, the cruelty is no glitch; it is the system functioning exactly as intended. Private prison profits, government tours through sites of historic brutality like Angola, and the silence of a nation enable a machine that does not just detain, it devours.
And at its center, the Alexandria Staging Facility stands like a modern-day gallows, not just processing deportations but extinguishing identities before anyone can intervene.
They came here for safety and found a graveyard that pretends to be a country. Behind every locked door is someone who still believes their name matters. Behind every plane that leaves the runway is a family who will never know what happened. The cruelty keeps time with the heartbeat of the nation. It grows because we let it.
But it can stop when we refuse to look away. When we demand light in the places built for silence. When we start saying their names out loud again. When we do not normalize the cruelty and hold DHS accountable even after Trump is out of office.
You do not need a death certificate to disappear in Louisiana. You just need to arrive labeled as an immigrant.
A Quick Note From the Author:
I’ve been covering these stories all year — and I’m not done yet.
In my next article, I’ll be digging into the Venezuelan men killed in the illegal airstrikes on their bokes, and continuing to cover what the U.S. is really doing in Latin America. Because apparently, harming folks here isn’t enough for the sadists in office.
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how anyone can read this without crying....
How on earth was this going on before Trump?? Are we saying that this was going on during the Biden term? When we get a handle on what’s going on, this shit has to stop. This is fucked shit. Pardon my French .