The Pine Prairie ICE Processing Center, an immigrant detention facility in Louisiana, has come under fire for its horrific conditions and abusive practices.
As Sarah Decker, staff attorney for RFK Human Rights, told the local CBS affiliate, Pine Prairie has a long history of overtly hostile staff and excessive, often racially driven solitary confinement practices, which have only grown worse during the pandemic.
“Instead of providing people with correct mental health and medical care, they’re just separating them from the general population in punitive solitary confinement,” she said. “According to the United Nations, punitive solitary confinement for longer than 15 days is considered torture, so of the clients that we spoke to, I would say at least three quarters of them had been subjected to solitary confinement for longer than that 15-day threshold, which means they were subjected to torturous conditions by ICE.”
RFK Human Rights, Immigration Services and Legal Advocacy (ISLA), and 15 other immigrant rights groups have joined together to file a complaint to the Department of Homeland Security, demanding the agency take action to investigate Pine Prairie and hold ICE’s New Orleans field office accountable for failing to meet the agency’s own basic standards of care.
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