The United States maintains the world’s largest immigrant incarceration regime, imprisoning an average of over 35,000 people a day undergoing administrative proceedings to determine if they will be deported. Over 6,000 of those people, a mix of recently-arrived asylum seekers and long-term U.S. residents, are detained in Louisiana, the second-largest state for immigrant detention behind Texas. The explosion of immigrant incarceration in Louisiana occurred in the late 2010s and largely benefitted private prison companies, which run eight of the nine immigration jails in the state, profiting off of the abuses described in this report.
This report documents systemic human rights abuses carried out by or under the supervision of the New Orleans Immigration and Customs Enforcement Field Office (“NOLA ICE”), the federal office that oversees immigration detention in Louisiana. NOLA ICE contracts with two private prison companies and a local sheriff’s office to operate Louisiana’s nine immigration jails. Inside those jails, officials rampantly violate detained peoples’ human and civil rights, locking them away in punitive conditions indistinguishable from those in criminal jails and prisons, in some cases for prolonged periods lasting years. 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.