Since Mahmoud Khalil’s arrest by US immigration agents on March 8 and subsequent detention by Immigration Customs and Enforcement (ICE), a group of activists have held a series of demonstrations outside Lasalle Detention Center in Jena, Louisiana where he is being held. The latest rally took place on April 15, where protesters called for the release of Khalil as well as University of Alabama doctoral student Alireza Doroudi, who is also being held in Jena.
“My name is Mahmoud Khalil and I am a political prisoner,” read the first public statement made by the detained Columbia University student activist since his illegal arrest by immigration authorities on March 8. “I am writing to you from a detention facility in Louisiana where I wake to cold mornings and spend long days bearing witness to the quiet injustices underway against a great many people precluded from the protections of the law.”
Khalil is one of the most high-profile detainees in what has been dubbed “detention alley” in the Deep South region of the US, and used the first sentences of his statement to draw attention to his fellow detainees, who also languish in detention without due process.
14 of the 20 largest immigration detention centers in the US are located in the southern states of Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas, where thousands of immigrants are locked up in remote facilities notorious for human rights abuses including torture and medical neglect. “Detention alley” is where the Trump administration is sending students in its escalating crackdown on free speech, including Khalil, held in the LaSalle Detention Center in Jena, Louisiana, Tufts University student Rumeysa Ozturk, held in the South Louisiana ICE processing center, and Georgetown University researcher Badar Khan Suri, sent first to a detention center in Alexandria, Louisiana and then to another detention center in Prairieland, Texas.
Activists fight the for-profit detention machine
“Even as someone who’s lived in the South my whole life, in plenty of rural places, it was very striking to see how isolated this facility is,” said Harper Cummings, who has attended multiple actions outside of the detention center in Jena. “As soon as we heard that Mahmoud was being moved there, those of us who are from the region immediately understood that this was an attempt to separate him from any kind of legal support, political support, just to isolate him as much as possible.” According to Cummings, Louisiana and the Deep South in general, a region dominated by a more conservative political class than the rest of the country, is seen by the Trump administration as “a place they could rely on to give them the kind of favorable court rulings they wanted and to minimize as much as possible any kind of political response.”
At the rally on Tuesday, activists held signs calling for Khalil’s release, and one read “jail prison profiteers, not immigrants.”
Eight out of nine of Louisiana’s ICE facilities are run by for-profit corporations, which are incentivized to cut costs through violations of human rights including medical neglect. In the Jena facility, the civil rights division of the Department of Homeland Security (which Trump has since gutted) examined four deaths which occurred between January 2016 and March 2017, revealing frequently delayed medical care and a “failure of nursing staff to report abnormal vital signs.” According to a complaint filed by the ACLU of Louisiana to the DHS’s civil rights division in December 2024 regarding the South Louisiana ICE Processing Center where Ozturk is being held, “guards left detained people suffering from severe conditions like external bleeding, tremors, and sprained limbs unattended to, refusing them access to diagnostic care.”
“It’s clear that these facilities really exist for the purpose of profit,” said Jade Woods, who has demonstrated several times outside of the facility in Jena. “They’re run by these for-profit corporations like the GEO Group. They are known for bad food, insufficient shelter. All of these conditions show that these companies are cutting costs in every possible way.”
A spokesperson for the GEO Group, the for-profit corporation that runs many ICE detention centers around the country including the one in which Khalil is being held, told The Guardian that it “strongly disagrees with the allegations that have been made regarding services we provide at GEO-contracted ICE processing centers,” and that “these allegations are part of a longstanding, politically motivated, and radical campaign to abolish ICE and end federal immigration detention by attacking the federal government’s immigration facility contracts.”
ICE detention and mass incarceration
Over 12,000 people are held in ICE detention centers in Texas, and over 7,000 in Louisiana. According to numbers from April 6, 46.5% of ICE immigrant detainees have no criminal record.
“In theory, individuals are locked in immigration detention not as punishment for a crime but to allow the federal government to process them for admission or removal under the civil immigration system,” reads a report from August 2024 compiled by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the National Immigration Project, Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights, and Immigration Services and Legal Advocacy (ISLA). “In reality, as the testimonies of people in this report shows, the punitive conditions of immigration jails work to isolate immigrants from legal assistance, in service of what evidence indicates is the government’s objective to deter further immigration.”
The August 2024 report documents the rampant human rights abuses inside what it labels the “black hole” of remote Louisiana ICE detention centers. The state had a surge in immigration detention during Trump’s first term, with new detention centers capable of holding thousands more detainees opening in remote areas, some in former privately-run prisons. According to the report, eight out of nine of Louisiana ICE detention centers “are converted criminal facilities with dark histories of mistreatment of incarcerated people that are alive in cultures of abuse today.”
When it comes to the Louisiana prison system, the state has the highest per-capita incarceration in the country, and is home to one of the most notorious prisons in the country, Louisiana State Penitentiary or “Angola,” built on the ruins of a former slave plantation and employing many of the same practices of forced labor against its majority-Black inmates.
“This is a place where there has been this massive boom in the industry of incarceration, that has built the infrastructure for other forms of detention and incarceration to spread as well,” Jade Woods told Peoples Dispatch.
Facing the behemoth of mass incarceration and mass ICE detention, Woods and other activists pledge to continue to rally. “We were loud,” said Woods of the Tuesday demonstration in Jena. “We were trying to make sure that our message was heard not only inside the facility, but to all who were listening online or on television, that the people in Louisiana are taking a stand against this grave injustice.”
