Angola prison... ICE Opens Immigrant Detention Center in Notorious Louisiana Prison
Molly Molloy
ICE Opens Immigrant Detention Center in Notorious Louisiana Prison
Critics are questioning the decision to hold immigrants at the maximum-security facility known as Angola, which has a troubled history.
By Rick Rojas
Reporting from Atlanta
The maximum-security prison known as Angola, notorious for a history of violence and harsh conditions, has long been the repository for Louisiana’s worst offenders. Most inmates arrive with life sentences.
Now, the prison, officially the Louisiana State Penitentiary, will also hold immigrants who have been detained as part of the Trump administration’s widening crackdown, federal and state officials said on Wednesday.
Like the prison itself, Gov. Jeff Landry of Louisiana said, the immigrant detention center there will house “the worst of the worst,” allowing federal immigration authorities to “consolidate the most violent offenders into a single deportation and holding facility.”
“If you don’t think that they belong in somewhere like this,” Mr. Landry, a Republican, said in a news conference on Wednesday, “you’ve got a problem.”
Officials said that as of Wednesday, 51 male detainees had been moved into the facility, and that by later this month, it would hold more than 200. It has a total capacity of about 400. The immigrants detained at Angola will be “completely isolated” from the rest of the prison’s population, and the center will be run by ICE contractors, the governor said.
Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, said at the news conference that immigrants detained at Angola would be “high risk” individuals, naming several examples that included men convicted of offenses including murder, sexual assault, battery and possessing large troves of child sexual abuse imagery.
The detention center takes over an area that had been called Camp J, the site of one of Angola’s most restrictive units, where inmates were held in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day in conditions that criminal justice activists likened to a dungeon. At its peak, the camp held more than 400 prisoners.
It was closed in 2018, with prison officials citing security concerns and safety risks caused by the aging facility’s deteriorating condition. But Mr. Landry issued an emergency declaration in July intended to speed up the repairs, saying that the prison needed the additional capacity.
The development further solidifies Louisiana’s position as a crucial hub for President Trump’s deportation efforts. But it is also provoking alarm, as immigration and criminal justice advocates express concern about housing people accused of violating immigration laws in a facility like Angola and about the potential for violating constitutional protections.
Louisiana is among a number of states working hand in hand with federal immigration officials as part of an aggressive national effort to expel undocumented immigrants. It has come with tens of billions of dollars in additional funding, but has also left officials racing to vastly increase their detention capacity.
This summer, Florida opened a remote detention center on an airfield in the Everglades and named it “Alligator Alcatraz,” with state officials describing a forbidding terrain packed with alligators and pythons as part of the security apparatus. A federal judge recently ordered the state and federal governments to stop holding detainees there, but Gov. Ron DeSantis is close to opening another center in an empty prison near Jacksonville.
Nebraska and Indiana have also been part of the push to detain immigrants in state-operated facilities.
Officials have taken to giving the sites alliterative nicknames that have been a source of humor for the president’s supporters, but that have also been condemned by critics as reflecting a casually cruel approach to immigration enforcement. The Angola detention center, officials said, will be called “Louisiana Lockup.”
Data has shown that many of the immigrants arrested by ICE around the country in recent months have no criminal convictions, and in many cases no charges against them.
Louisiana already has some of the largest ICE detention centers in the South, part of cluster of facilities in a string of rural and remote towns referred to as “detention alley.” Those facilities attracted attention this year after the federal government held Mahmoud Khalil, a pro-Palestinian activist, Columbia graduate student and legal permanent resident, at a detention center in Jena, La., for 104 days. Rumeysa Ozturk, a Tufts graduate student in the country on a student visa, was held for six weeks at a similar facility in Basile, La.
An otherwise modest regional airfield in Alexandria, La., has become central to the administration’s immigration efforts, with more deportation flights taking off and domestic ICE flights passing through there than anywhere else in the country. Adjacent to the airfield is a 70,000-square-foot detention center holding thousands of immigrants.
Louisiana has a long legacy as the nation’s, if not the world’s, prison capital, with Angola at the forefront.
The prison is set along a horseshoe bend in the Mississippi River, roughly an hour by country roads from Baton Rouge, the state capital. It is the country’s largest maximum-security prison, sprawling across a plot of land larger than Manhattan.
Established in 1901, it was built on the grounds of several former plantations, including one called Angola, where cotton, corn and livestock were raised. Inmates were forced to work in the fields, and there was recurring unrest, leading to the prison becoming known as the bloodiest in the South.
In 1951, more than 50 inmates slashed their Achilles tendons to protest the conditions and avoid working in the fields.
Over the past two decades, the conditions have improved in some ways. But Angola has still drawn legal challenges and scrutiny from advocates concerned about its conditions.
In 2023, the state, bowing to a legal challenge and mounting public pressure, stopped housing teenagers in what had once been the prison’s death row. Lawyers for the youths held there said that officials routinely kept them in windowless, concrete cells without working air conditioning and used solitary confinement as a form of punishment.
At the news conference on Wednesday, officials said they were well aware of the notoriety attached to Angola and hoped it would help persuade undocumented immigrants to leave the country on their own.
“It’s legendary,” Ms. Noem said.
Rick Rojas is the Atlanta bureau chief for The Times, leading coverage of the South.