How Louisiana Built Trump’s Busiest ICE Deportation Hub

Alexandria International Airport has the feel of a small commercial airfield, with a shop selling coffee and snacks and panoramic windows overlooking the runaways where a dozen American and Delta flights take off and land on a typical day.

A few hundred yards from the passenger gates, though, is a far busier patch of tarmac. This is where Badar Khan Suri arrived on an afternoon in March.

Mr. Suri, an Indian citizen who has a visa to do research at Georgetown University, was marched off the plane in handcuffs and leg shackles and into a 70,000-square-foot detention center known officially as the “Alexandria Staging Facility.”

The State Department had sought the deportation of Mr. Suri, asserting that his presence in the country compromised “a compelling U.S. foreign policy interest.” Mr. Suri’s wife, a Palestinian American, had drawn the attention of pro-Israel activists for her sharp criticism of Israel on social media, and for her father’s former role as a government official in Gaza.

And so he found himself among thousands of foreign nationals flown to Alexandria, La., after being taken into federal custody as part of the Trump administration’s sprawling immigration crackdown.

No airport has become more crucial to carrying out President Trump’s pledge to deport millions of immigrants.

“You won’t even believe something like that can exist,” Mr. Suri, 41, said in a recent interview, recalling days spent in windowless rooms with hundreds of men, disconnected from the outside world and not knowing where they would be taken next.

Since the beginning of the second Trump administration, more than 21,000 people taken into custody by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have passed through the Alexandria detention facility. More deportation flights have taken off from there than from any other place in the United States, and more domestic ICE flights have passed through there than anywhere else, according to a widely cited database of ICE flights. The database, verified by Times reporters, is maintained by Tom Cartwright, a refugee advocate with the immigrant rights group Witness at the Border.

With eight other detention centers within a hundred miles of Alexandria, and more detainees than any state but Texas, Louisiana has emerged as the busiest axis of the national deportation machine that the Trump administration has been trying to build at breakneck speed.

Since the 1980s, an immigration detention system has been growing in the state, backed by a succession of presidential administrations aiming to hold — and in many cases, expel — thousands of people who were in the country illegally.

But the scale of the system expanded enormously after Mr. Trump came into the White House in 2017 and pledged a major expansion of immigrant enforcement. A cluster of Louisiana jails and prisons, once the backbone of rural towns like the mills or factories of years past, were reborn as low-cost detention centers for ICE.

Mr. Trump reclaimed this system when he returned to the presidency, and his administration immediately put it into overdrive. With tens of billions of dollars in additional funding now directed toward ICE, Louisiana is at the leading edge of an expansive and aggressive nationwide effort to expel immigrants, far beyond the actions taken during the first Trump administration.

Indeed, the airport hub, with its network of surrounding detention centers, is in many ways a template for what the head of ICE, Todd Lyons, has said the agency must become: a logistics juggernaut, like Amazon or FedEx, “but with human beings.”

The credo that the government should be run like a corporation is not new, and ICE has for years contracted with private corrections companies and welcomed private-sector expertise, even hiring McKinsey & Company, the consulting firm, for an organizational makeover. But the logistics operations behind this business-minded approach to detentions and deportations are now front and center.

“We need to be better about removing those individuals who have been lawfully ordered out of the country in a safe, efficient manner,” Mr. Lyons said in an April interview with a Boston news station, reiterating his belief that “ICE should be run like a corporation.” But, he said, “we can’t trade innovation and efficiency for how we treat the people in our custody.”

Mr. Lyons wasn’t the first ICE official to see FedEx as a model for immigration detentions and deportations. More than a decade earlier, before the airport detention center was even open, the ICE field office in New Orleans was patterning its system after FedEx — specifically, its hub-and-spoke model, in which FedEx packages are routed through its centralized Memphis hub, sorted and then distributed outward. People taken into ICE custody in Louisiana or one of four nearby states would be flown or bused to central Louisiana, and then sent on to whichever detention facility in the region had space.

But it was still expensive and complicated to carry out the last leg — deporting people. On a steakhouse cocktail napkin, as one ICE official would recall, a plan was sketched out. The Air Force base in Alexandria had shut down in 1992, and the state was looking to make use of the infrastructure beyond Alexandria International Airport, which opened on the site a year later. Why not build a detention center on the tarmac and put people on deportation flights right there?

In 2014, the Alexandria Staging Facility opened under the management of the private prison company Geo Group. There were marching bands and appearances from politicians, including then-U.S. Senator Mary Landrieu, Democrat of Louisiana, who helped cut the ribbon.

With its 400 beds right next to a runway, the 72-hour holding facility is the only one of its kind, a matter of pride for ICE officials and local officials alike.

“Imagine this as a hub: they go pick people up, bring them here and then sort them out,” said Ralph Hennessy, the executive director of the economic development organization that oversees the former Air Force base property. He said in a recent interview that he understood there was controversy around ICE’s ramped-up deportation efforts, but that the agency was simply carrying out the law. “It’s got to happen somewhere,” he said.

The Business of ICE Detention

Louisiana locks up more people per capita than nearly any other U.S. state, and unlike other states, a majority of Louisiana’s prisoners are held in local jails, with the state paying local sheriffs a daily rate per inmate. This can be lucrative, but managing jails is difficult. As the prison population grew in the 1990s and 2000s, some sheriffs began outsourcing state prisoners to private companies, including Geo Group and LaSalle Corrections.

In 2017, the state’s governor, John Bel Edwards, a Democrat, successfully pushed through legislation aimed at reducing the prison population, and the number of state prisoners fell by more than 8,000 over the next five years.

At the same time, immigration arrests were ramping up sharply under the first Trump administration, and ICE needed thousands more beds. For private corrections companies in Louisiana, where the demand for state prison space was falling, this presented a new revenue opportunity at just the right time. The immigration crackdown was prompting resistance elsewhere, including bans in other states on privately run immigration detention centers, but in Louisiana, there was hardly any friction.

This remains true.

With cheap labor and real estate, the daily cost of holding an ICE detainee in the region is roughly a third of the average daily cost elsewhere. The highest court in the region — the federal appeals court based in New Orleans — is particularly Trump-friendly, and the state’s top elected officials, all of whom are Republicans, have put up no opposition. In the rural parts of the state where the detention centers are, local officials from both parties welcome the jobs the centers bring. Immigration lawyers, however, point out that the remote locations of the centers mean meetings with clients require hours of driving.

Between 2016 and 2020, as jails and prisons around the state were repurposed into federal detention centers, the number of beds for ICE detainees in Louisiana more than tripled, and very little had to be built.

“Same private prison companies, a lot of the same staff, same infrastructure, same buildings,” said Sarah Decker, a lawyer at the nonprofit organization Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights and a co-author of a 2024 report on Louisiana’s detention centers.

The Richwood Correctional Center, which is managed by LaSalle Corrections, is one such local prison turned ICE detention center.

Once a farming community, Richwood, La., is a town of 3,800 people, many of them older and living on fixed incomes. When it housed state prisoners, the correctional center was a source of local employment and troubling headlines. In 2015, one inmate was killed by another, who in turn died after being beaten by corrections officers. In 2019, two supervisors pleaded guilty to a cover-up after officers lined up handcuffed inmates and pepper-sprayed them in the face. That same year, LaSalle entered a contract to hold a minimum of 677 immigrant detainees. Within months, a Cuban man being held in solitary confinement died by suicide.

The mayor of Richwood, Gerald Brown, a Democrat in a town where more than 90 percent of voters cast ballots for Kamala Harris, said he understood the concerns about immigrant detention. But he said the people running the Richwood facility became more engaged with the local community after the site transitioned to an ICE detention center, taking part in town parades and inviting him to visit the facility. The employees there earn significantly higher wages than before, he said.

And the fees that LaSalle Corrections paid to the town to operate the prison more than tripled, to nearly half a million dollars annually. The detention center is now the largest source of annual revenue in Richwood’s $1.7 million budget.

“We’ve been able to invest a lot more in our police department,” Mr. Brown said. The town hired more officers, bought more police cars and outfitted the vehicles with new technology. “It opened up a lot of things.”

An Overcrowded System

Inside the Richwood facility, which is in the woods behind a neighborhood of modest homes, nearly 1,200 detainees from all over the world wait in limbo.

“When I arrived, we were like 50 people, but every day more and more people entered,” said Adriana Mata Sánchez, 44, who was detained at Richwood for three months earlier this year. She had entered the country illegally from Mexico in 2001.

People slept on double and triple bunks stacked so tight there was no room to sit upright. The lights turned off at midnight and back on again four hours later, with guards yelling for them to get up.

There were young women, mothers and grandmothers. At least one woman was pregnant. Some had been in the center for weeks, others for months. Some, like Ms. Mata Sánchez, were paid a dollar a shift to clean bathrooms or work in the kitchen. A Haitian woman she befriended would later die in a detention center in Florida.

A native of Mexico, Ms. Mata Sánchez had been living near Fort Worth for more than two decades, working in meatpacking plants and raising a family. In February, she was pulled over by the police while traveling through Mississippi on her way to Atlanta and handed over to ICE. She was then driven to Richwood.

Like many of the people in detention in Louisiana now, Ms. Mata Sánchez was arrested far from the southern border. For years, many of the detention centers were filled with asylum seekers taken into custody at or near the border. But with border crossings down since late in the Biden administration, the Trump administration’s enforcement efforts have focused on detaining people in the interior of the country.

Many have lived in the United States for years and have no criminal convictions. Some had been cited for traffic violations; others had missed paperwork deadlines. Some detainees, like Mr. Suri, the Georgetown researcher, appear to have drawn the administration’s political disapproval. Many were arrested in places like Philadelphia, New York or Virginia and within days found themselves behind razor wire in rural Louisiana.

“They don’t realize where they’re at,” said David Rozas, an immigration attorney based in Baton Rouge, La.

Lawyers and federal oversight officials have criticized conditions inside the detention centers, highlighting poor medical care, widespread use of solitary confinement and physical abuse. In a 2023 government report, Richwood was cited for shortcomings in cleanliness and medical care; the average daily population at Richwood has increased nearly by half since mid-February and now exceeds 1,129, which was the maximum capacity when the report was written. In interviews, detainees said beds have been added in recent months.

LaSalle Corrections, which operates the Richwood Correctional Center, did not respond to multiple requests for comment. In public statements, the company has said its employees show compassion and concern for the people “entrusted to our care.”

For most in detention in Louisiana, getting out is very difficult. Immigration judges in the region have historically granted asylum at some of the lowest rates in the country.

In the first few months of the year, judges had been releasing some detainees on bond. But this avenue is also narrowing: In early July, the Trump administration declared that all immigrants who entered the country illegally were ineligible for a bond hearing.

“You’re starting to see a lot of people lose hope,” said Christopher Kinnison, one of the few immigration lawyers based in Alexandria, La. “ICE has beaten them down so badly with the conditions of detention and just being stuck in prison for so many months that a lot of people, you know, they’re giving up.”

Ms. Mata Sánchez did not have a lawyer. She began to realize that she could spend many more months in detention before a scheduled hearing — and still be deported. Knowing that a voluntary departure could allow her to try to return legally, she asked a judge to leave the country. On May 9, she was flown to Texas through the Alexandria airport; the next day, she was driven to Mexico in a caravan of buses with other deportees.

While lawyers in Louisiana lament that more and more clients are asking to leave the country rather than wait out the hearing process, the Department of Homeland Security has made it clear that is the desired outcome, running ads encouraging people to “self-deport.”

For the Trump administration, the solution to an increasingly crowded detention system is to build more detention facilities.

The policy bill that Mr. Trump signed on July 4 gives ICE $45 billion for new detention centers and the expansion of existing ones. The two largest private security companies, Geo Group and CoreCivic, already announced plans to add at least 6,000 more beds to existing facilities in several states and by converting former prisons or reopening idle facilities in Michigan, New Jersey, California and Texas.

Recently, Florida, in coordination with ICE, began housing immigrants in a tent camp erected along an airstrip in the Everglades, naming it “Alligator Alcatraz.” In July, the government contracted to build a 5,000-bed facility in Texas that is expected to be similar to the operation in Alexandria.

“ICE’s goal is to swiftly remove aliens and keep them in ICE facilities for as short of a time as possible,” a Homeland Security spokeswoman wrote in a statement. With the new funding, “ICE will be equipped with $14.4 billion for deportation flights to remove criminal illegal aliens.”

In a statement, the Geo Group said “all persons entrusted to our care are treated in a safe, secure and humane manner.” The company, the statement said, was “ready to continue to help the federal government meet its expanded immigration enforcement priorities.”

In his days at the Alexandria Staging Facility, Mr. Suri recalled watching hundreds of men come and go every few hours. Officers would shout for everyone from a certain country, he said, and march them out en masse. Those who stayed behind, and those who were constantly arriving, remained in the dark about what was in store.

“All the Guatemalans will leave in the morning, all the Nicaraguans will leave in the evening,” he recalled. “All the Colombians have disappeared: Where are those people? Oh, all of the Colombians were removed at night.”

On March 21, three days after his arrival in Louisiana, Mr. Suri was handcuffed and shackled, put in the back of a transport bus and driven alone to a detention center in Texas, where he slept on a plastic pallet in a common room. Fifty-four days later, a judge ordered he be released on bond. Mr. Suri’s case drew attention from the news media and was taken up by the American Civil Liberties Union. The vast majority of those in detention do not get such support.

“I see those people, the uncertainty on their faces,” Mr. Suri said. When people were waiting at Alexandria, he said, “they were nowhere. Nobody knew where they were.”