Why ICE is sending detained immigrant students to remote Louisiana facilities accused of human rights abuses
Mahmoud Khalil, who was studying at Columbia, and Alireza Doroudi, from the University of Alabama, are both being held at an ICE processing center in Jena, Louisiana.
At least three students recently detained by the Trump administration and put in deportation proceedings have been taken to highly remote detention centers in rural Louisiana that human rights groups have called “a black hole.”
Students Mahmoud Khalil, Rumeysa Ozturk and Alireza Doroudi were arrested near their homes, then taken hundreds of miles away to desolate, rural detention centers in a state that, since President Donald Trump's first administration, has become an increasingly critical part of the country’s immigrant detention apparatus.
The federal government has broad authority to transfer immigrants facing deportation to different facilities. But advocates and experts said that there have been major human rights abuses in facilities in this region and that the Trump administration has sent the students to a very conservative jurisdiction that is highly favorable to its immigration policy goals.
“They’re being placed in facilities that have pretty horrendous conditions, a lot of difficulties with access to counsel and in what is really a more hostile legal jurisdiction to fight their case for the right to remain in the United States,” said Mary Yanik, the director of the Immigrant Rights Clinic at Tulane Law School in New Orleans. Yanik is also an associate law professor at the university.
The Department of Homeland Security’s ICE detention facility in Jena, La., on March 21.Stephen Smith / AP fileThe Department of Homeland Security did not comment on its decision to detain the students in Louisiana, allegations against facilities in the state or the role the facilities play in the administration’s immigration agenda. The White House did not respond to a request for comment. In court documents related to the arrest of Khalil, the administration said overcrowded facilities and bedbugs in the Northeast led to its decision to send him to Louisiana. Khalil, a legal permanent resident and pro-Palestinian protest leader at Columbia University, was arrested at his apartment building in New York City on March 8, before being shuttled to a detention center in New Jersey and then taken some 1,000 miles away to the Central Louisiana ICE Processing Center in Jena, Louisiana.
Rating: 5