Lawyers representing a human rights activist detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement filed a complaint in December 2024 that exposes the use of torture and other cruel and degrading treatment, including sexual abuse and prolonged solitary confinement, at the Central Louisiana ICE Processing Center in Jena, Louisiana, a private prison that operates as a federal immigration detention facility run by the Geo Group.

The complaint reveals how ICE detention officials denied adequate medical care to Mr. Daniel Cortes De La Valle, a native and citizen of Colombia who first entered the United States in 1998 as an eight-year-old child, where he lived for over 25 years and raised two U.S. citizen children. In 2019, Daniel began to suffer from a seizure condition, resulting in several admissions to the emergency room and recurring seizures every three to four months.

ICE officials refused to give Daniel prescribed medication and treatment for his seizure condition, knowingly causing him serious physical and mental harm. As punishment for his self-advocacy and the multiple grievances and complaints he filed, ICE subjected Daniel to retaliatory and inhumane solitary confinement, physical and verbal abuse, sexual assault, and threats of torture. Faced with deteriorating physical and psychological health, Daniel felt coerced into abandoning his legal claims for relief from removal in immigration court. To escape ongoing abuse, he requested voluntary departure from the United States, permanently separating him from his U.S. citizen family, including his two young children.

Daniel’s story is featured in Inside the Black Hole, a human rights report by Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights and the Southeast Dignity not Detention Coalition that exposes systemic human rights abuses in Louisiana immigration detention centers. 

A copy of Daniel’s administrative complaint can be viewed here.