ICE Is Sending Asylum-Seekers to the Private Prison Where Mother Jones Exposed Abuse

The administration is vastly expanding its detention of immigrants in remote parts of Louisiana.

Inmates on cots at Winn Correctional Center in Louisiana while Mother Jones' Shane Bauer worked there as a guard.Shane Bauer/Mother Jones

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

In 2016, Mother Jones reporter Shane Bauer took readers inside a Louisiana private prison where he spent four months working as a guard. His award-winning investigation exposed a dehumanizing institution plagued by rampant violence and medical neglect. Now the Trump administration is using the same facility to detain asylum-seekers who seek protection at the southern border.

Mother Jones reported last month that since February, Immigration and Customs Enforcement had started using three Louisiana jails run by the private prison company LaSalle Corrections to house asylum-seekers. ICE added a fourth LaSalle facility this month: the Winn Correctional Center, which was operated by the Corrections Corporation of America (since renamed CoreCivic) when Bauer worked there. The management has changed, but it is still a prison designed to hold convicted criminals, not foreigners fleeing violence, persecution, and poverty.

Winn is currently holding about 1,500 people, including both immigrants and criminals. ICE spokesman Bryan Cox confirmed that the agency began using the facility this month but did not say how many immigrants are or will ultimately be detained there. Marshall Goff, an attorney with the Mississippi law firm Chhabra & Gibbs, says a Winn prison official told him that more than 1,000 immigrants are expected to be held there soon.

The prison, which is more than four hours from both Houston and New Orleans, is in the ā€œmiddle of absolute nowhere,ā€ Goff says. When he visited for the first time on Saturday, it was clear to him that it was designed to be a prison, not a jail that holds people serving short sentences. It was striking to Goff that immigrants, who are held in a separate area of the prison, “are being housed in the same place as people who commit felonies and who’ve been sentenced for decades.” His overall impression was that everything was being done “on the fly.” Corrections Corporation of America logos, he said, are still all over the facility.

On Facebook, a woman whose profile identifies her as an accounting clerk at Winn, wrote in late May that the facility would soon hold about 1,400 immigrants once criminals were removed to make space for them. She worried that “illegal immigrants” could bring tuberculosis and implied that they might escape because ā€œthey are already good at jumping fences.ā€ (Asylum-seekers generally arrive not clandestinely but by coming to official border crossings, where they are made to wait for weeks by US officials, or turning themselves in to Border Patrol agents.)

Under Trump, ICE is increasingly contracting with local jails and private prisons around the country to house migrants since its own detention centers don’t have enough capacity to hold the people it detains. In Louisiana, the agency has hugely expanded its presence, causing many migrants to be sent from the border to remote parts of the state. This expansion could allow ICE to detain more than 7,000 people at a time in Louisiana, more than triple its capacity in 2016. Only Texas has more immigration detention space.

Louisiana is one of the worst places in the country for immigrants to be detained, since attorneys are in short supply, the stateā€™s judges are among the toughest in the nation, and ICEā€™s regional office denies nearly everyoneā€™s applications to be released from detention. ICE was detaining roughly 53,000 people last week nationwide, even though Congress has told it to go back to detaining about 40,000 people by September.

ICEā€™s New Orleans office, which covers Louisiana and four other Southern states, is the least likely of any regional office to release asylum-seekers from detention while they’re awaiting their hearings in immigration court. Last year, it released just 1.5 percent of migrants seeking paroleā€”down from 75.9 percent in 2016. The Southern Poverty Law Center and American Civil Liberties Union of Louisiana are now suing ICE to force the New Orleans office to follow the agency’s own parole policy, which requires people to be released if they donā€™t pose a threat to public safety or a flight risk.

 

As Bauer wrote in 2016, the jail provides an important source of revenue and jobs in an area where nearly 30 percent of people live below the poverty line. LaSalle is looking to hire bilingual detention officers to work at Winn for $19.44 an hour. Applicants, according to a job posting, must be ā€œemotionally stable,ā€ drug free, and speak Spanish or other foreign languages.

Goff and other attorneys have been told that immigrants at Winn will have their cases heard by judges in the Justice Departmentā€™s Otero, New Mexico, immigration court via videoconference feeds. Asylum-seekers at other LaSalle jails are going before judges in Virginia and upstate New York, since the swelling number of detainees in Louisiana exceeds the capacity of immigration judges in the state to hear their cases.

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We canā€™t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who wonā€™t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its futureā€”you.

And we need readers to show up for us big timeā€”again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We canā€™t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who wonā€™t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its futureā€”you.

And we need readers to show up for us big timeā€”again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate