Dispatches from Detention shares stories of people encountered by RFK Human Rights attorneys in legal outreach trips to the country’s most isolated immigration detention centers. Names have been changed to protect privacy.

Central Louisiana ICE Processing Center, Jena, Louisiana

“I was just going home from the store.”

– Wilmer, 19, from Nicaragua

Wilmer, a nineteen-year-old father of a toddler, was riding his bike home from a grocery run to the Dollar General in his small Mississippi town. It was dark, but he knew the way, and his partner and their baby awaited him. Then, suddenly, a siren wailed and the night filled with flashing blue lights.

Wilmer’s English was good enough to understand that the officer was citing him for riding without a bike light. But he didn’t understand what would happen next: the officer handcuffed him and held him overnight in the county jail. The next day, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) came for him, taking him three hours away to the Central Louisiana ICE Processing Center in Jena, Louisiana. 

That’s where lawyers from RFK Human Rights met him, sitting on a plastic chair under fluorescent lights in a cramped room. His face was tired. His voice was flat and lifeless, a sign of how dazed he was over how a simple bike ride had turned into the possibility of permanent separation from his family.

Wilmer’s arrest over the most trivial of infractions was similar to many stories heard from others. One man in his early twenties was detained for having outstanding traffic tickets, even after attempting to pay. Another was locked up after calling the police to help get his car out of a ditch. Others had been sent to immigration detention when they called the police from the scene of car accidents, even when they weren’t at fault. 

All of them had been delivered to ICE by local law enforcement. Under what’s known as a 287(g) agreement, named for the provision of federal law that authorizes it, the Department of Homeland Security deputizes local police to perform immigration functions. That opens the door to abuses of power by local police, who claim authority to seize people solely to investigate their immigration status or to hold them in jail after they’ve been cleared for release under local law so that ICE officers can transfer them to a detention center. Multiple federal investigations have found that local police departments operating under 287(g) agreements have engaged in patterns of unconstitutional racial profiling.

In Mississippi, the state where Wilmer was sent to immigration detention for riding without a bicycle light, the entire state recently entered its first 287(g) agreement. In inking the deal, Mississippi’s Attorney General Lynn Fitch claimed that the partnership would “strengthen our efforts to combat human trafficking, drug cartels, and violent crime.”

But Wilmer and the men like him more closely resembled the 71.7% of the June 2025 immigration detention population that have no criminal conviction. And that number counts traffic violations as convictions.

There’s no evidence that 287(g) agreements make communities safer. But one study found that up to 94% of state judges across the country were concerned or very concerned that increased hostility to immigration is discouraging immigrants and people with limited English proficiency from cooperating as witnesses in court cases. In the same study, law enforcement officers reported that fear of deportation was a top reason given by immigrants and people with limited English proficiency for not cooperating with criminal investigations. The narrative that increased cooperation between local law enforcement and ICE increases safety simply doesn’t hold water. Yet politicians and private prison executives benefit from this fearmongering at the expense of people like Wilmer, who sits in a detention center notorious for physical and sexual abuse of detained people. And that makes Wilmer’s story a testament to policies more dangerous than a bike on a nighttime country road.