Report Exposes 'Systemic Abuse' at For-Profit Migrant Detention Centers in Louisiana

A coalition of rights groups on Monday released a report documenting "systemic human rights abuses" at migrant detention centers in Louisiana and called for an end to the use of for-profit facilities by U.S. agencies.

The 108-page report, drawn from more than 6,000 interviews at Lousiana immigrant detention centers since 2022, was produced by Robert F. Kennedy (RFK) Human Rights, the ACLU, the ACLU of Louisiana, Immigration Services and Legal Advocacy, and the National Immigration Project.

Louisiana has nine immigrant detention centers that together typically hold more than 6,000 people—second only to Texas. Eight of the nine are run by for-profit companies that have contracts with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

The report—which calls for these detention centers, which are under the remit of the New Orleans (NOLA) ICE field office, to be shut down—details a wide range of abuses including sexual assault, humiliating speech, medical neglect, and a lack of nutritious food and clean water.

"These individuals have fled persecution and violence only to be thrown in 'civil' detention and left to fend for themselves in an abusive, profit-driven, and manipulative system," Sarah Decker, a lawyer at RFK Human Rights and a lead author of the report, said in a statement.

"We've heard horrific stories over the last two years, stories that have been corroborated by extensive documentation," she added. "Our findings further support what detained people and their advocates have long demanded: the NOLA ICE jails must be shut down."

Many of the interviews with the rights groups were conducted as part of initial legal screenings with detainees seeking representation. The work revealed widespread "inhumane treatment" at the nine facilities, including prolonged solitary confinement and the extended use of restrictive five-point shackles.

The report says the centers' food is insufficiently nutritious and cites instances of it being contaminated by rats or cockroaches. Authorities there often deny detainees access to menstrual products and key medicines, it says.

The report's authors argued that some of the abuses qualified as torture. "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," they wrote.

The nine facilities are in rural Louisiana, far from New Orleans. One is connected to an airport—the only such ICE facility in the country, making it a key hub for the federal agency as it moves detainees around. The network of Louisiana facilities the result of what the report authors called an "explosion of immigrant incarceration" in the state that took place in the late 2010s.

Four of the nine centers are run by Geo Group, a Florida-based multinational prison firm that has long been the target of activist rage and reform efforts, which the Biden administration hasn't successfully delivered. The company reported $2.41 billion in revenues for 2023. Four other facilities are run by LaSalle Corrections, which operates facilities across the U.S. South, while one is publicly run per an ICE contract with a local sheriff's office.

The report says that the "for-profit incentive" leads to "a dangerous combination of overcrowding and understaffing" as the firms seek to pad their bottom line. A woman at one detention center said she was not fed enough so she had to buy extra items at its commissary, where a bag of Doritos cost $9. Meanwhile, detainees who took jobs at the center earned as little as $1 per day.

The rights groups' statement calls for an immediate investigation into abuses at facilities under NOLA ICE's remit. In fact, the detention centers have already been the subject of a federal oversight investigation, initiated in December 2021, but no findings have yet been released publicly, an ACLU spokesperson told Common Dreams.