Immigrant students and scholars are being detained at remote facilities in Louisiana over objections

Louisiana is emerging as a linchpin for immigrant detention in President Donald Trump’s second term, at facilities far from New Orleans and beyond the immediate reach of most rights groups and attorneys.

Epicenter for detention

Immigrant detention in Louisiana surged during Trump's first term at facilities adapted from state prisons and local jails.

At the time a state criminal justice overhaul had reduced the prison population, threatening the economies of small towns that rely on the lockups.

Louisiana is the No. 2 state today for immigrant detention by ICE, after Texas. About 7,000 immigrants are held there in civil detention, according to government data compiled by Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse.

The Advocate

As fewer inmates fill Louisiana jails, wardens turn to immigration officials to fill bunks, budgets

Newsday

An attorney for the Department of Justice, August Flentje, wants the dispute litigated in Louisiana “for jurisdictional certainty.” A judge in Newark, New Jersey, heard jurisdictional arguments Friday and plans to issue a written ruling.

Immigration authorities are also holding 30-year-old Turkish student Rumeysa Ozturk at a detention center in Basile, about 170 miles (270 kilometers) west of New Orleans.

The Tufts University doctoral student was detained by immigration officials as she walked along a street in the Boston suburb of Somerville on Tuesday and transferred to Louisiana before a federal judge ordered her kept in Massachusetts.

Attorneys for another detained scholar, Alireza Doroudi, a doctoral student at the University of Alabama, said Friday that he was likely to be sent to an ICE center in Jena, Louisiana, a town of about 5,000 that is also far from major cities.

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