Louisiana has become an unexpected flashpoint in the struggle against Trump’s repressive agenda. Two more students were booked into the state’s ICE detention system last week for speaking out against the genocide in Gaza, joining Mahmoud Khalil who was arrested and jailed 1500 miles from his family in New York City. Washington elites were already using Louisiana’s ICE jails to detain large numbers of undocumented people. Now, they are using them to punish the student movement and disappear activists.
It is no accident that the rural South has become Washington’s favored destination for repression. Louisiana, as with all of the Deep South, bears a disproportionate burden of the suffering produced by capitalism. The working people of Louisiana are being deeply abused by systemic racism, crushing poverty, and high incarceration rates. But there is also an undeniable current of resistance here as well.
Out of sight, out of mind: A strategy for repression
Since the March 8 abduction of the Palestinian Columbia University student movement leader Mahmoud Khalil, the Trump administration has unleashed a forceful, frontal assault on the student movement, empowering the Department of Homeland Security to arrest, detain and attempt to deport non-citizen student activists accused of “un-American activity”; meaning, anyone who opposes the U.S.-backed Israeli genocide in Gaza.
Last week, DHS arrested Tufts University student Rumeysa Ozturk and transferred her to the South Louisiana Correctional Center in Basile, Louisana. Then, they arrested Alireza Doroudi of the University of Alabama and transferred him to the LaSalle ICE facility in Jena, Louisiana, the same facility as Mahmoud.
The Trump administration is using ICE detention in Louisiana as a black site to disappear activists. ICE intentionally isolates detainees in remote locations to limit their contact with the “outside” world, away from their families, lawyers, and channels of political support.
A state managed by Christian nationalists and fossil fuel executives
Louisiana is a convenient penal colony: it is a “deep red” state managed by an alliance of right-wing Christian nationalists and wealthy oil and gas executives. It is home to a reactionary court system and scant resources for immigrants outside of New Orleans and Baton Rouge. Trump and his billionaire friends think they can sweep through their far-right agenda here with minimal obstruction.
Both the Democrats and Republicans have abandoned the South and branded working people here as “backward” and uneducated, but take advantage of their oppression as it suits their repressive agenda. Now, the Trump administration is looking at Louisiana as ground zero for their crackdown on the student protest movement.
The facility where Mahmoud Khalil and Alireza Doroudi are detained is located on a backcountry road on the outskirts of Jena, a small town of 4,000 people. Jena gained notoriety with the case of the Jena Six in 2006-07, when the state charged six Black teenagers with the attempted murder of a white student after they defended themselves from white supremacist violence. The town is a four-hour drive from New Orleans, where nonprofit resources and legal aid for immigrants are concentrated.
Linked struggles: Palestine, immigrant justice, and the fight against racist mass incarceration
Louisiana is one of the most over-imprisoned places in the world, locking up a higher percentage of people than most countries. Most of the people incarcerated in Louisiana are Black men, often forced to labor in slavery-like conditions such as in the infamous maximum security Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola, Louisiana. Working class Louisianans deeply despise this system and understand it to be a racist holdover from slavery.
In both immigrant detention centers and state prisons, the state uses its prison system to warehouse so-called “undesirable” people, cut people off from their communities, and keep a lid on resistance. Immigrant rights activists consider Louisiana’s ICE jurisdiction a “black hole” where the state disappears immigrants to remote jails, away from public oversight and legal assistance.
After Texas, Louisiana detains more immigrants than any other state. This number surged during Trump’s first term. Currently, over 7,000 people are detained in Louisiana ICE facilities. All of these facilities are run by private, for-profit companies. Jena is operated by ICE’s biggest contractor, the Florida-based prison corporation GEO Group.
Private prison companies like GEO Group make a fortune from subjecting vulnerable people to torturous conditions. In 2024, GEO Group reported an annual revenue of $2.42 billion. To maximize profits, executives cut costs by keeping facilities understaffed and denying detainees basic food, clothing and medical care.
A report by the ACLU of Louisiana found that the state’s ICE facilities “routinely fail to comply with ICE’s own minimal standards of care, in addition to violating federal and international human rights law.” The report cites the denial of translation services, deprivation of human necessities like safe drinking water and minimal hygiene supplies, physical and sexual abuse, and medical abuse and neglect.
The Jena facility was a juvenile detention center between 1998-2001 prior to its opening as an ICE center in 2007. In 2000, the Department of Justice sued the jail and the state of Louisiana over allegations of “dangerous and life-threatening conditions.” A federal investigation found that the jail subjected the adolescent, mostly Black inmates to physical and psychological torture. The juvenile center was forced to shut down in 2001. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the state repurposed the facility to incarcerate inmates who had been evacuated from a New Orleans-area jail. Advocates rang the alarm when reports surfaced that guards were beating, shackling, and denying telephone access to detainees, according to Human Rights Watch.
The Trump administration thinks they can stifle resistance to their unpopular right-wing agenda by shipping off anyone who disagrees with or disobeys them and holding them “off the radar” in the rural South. But the mass protests all around the country and in many cities demanding Mahmoud Kahlil’s freedom show that they cannot hide what they are doing.
If they think the people of Louisiana will quietly consent, they are dead wrong. On March 11 students in New Orleans took to the streets to demand Mahmoud’s release. Louisianans have always mounted a fierce resistance against oppression, dating from the early slave insurrections to the first Civil Rights bus boycott, the movement to free the Jena Six, and recent struggles for police accountability. The ruling elites fashion the Deep South to be ground zero for repression, but Southerners understand that we are ground zero for resistance.
Liberation collage: Joyce Chediac
