At least three immigrant students recently detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents have been taken to highly remote detention centers in rural Louisiana to undergo deportation proceedings.
University students Mahmoud Khalil, Rumeysa Ozturk, and Alireza Doroudi were arrested and taken hundreds of miles away to these remote Louisiana facilities, NBC reports. While the federal government has authority to transfer immigrants facing deportation to different facilities, advocates and experts say human rights violations have been reported in facilities in this region. Others claim the Trump administration purposely sent the students to a conservative jurisdiction that is 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, director of the Immigrant Rights Clinic at Tulane Law School.
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Secretary of State Marco Rubio said during a March 27 news conference that the State Department has revoked more than 300 student visas. Many have been accused of participating in activities and activism that supports Hamas, which the students and their attorneys deny.
“It might be more than 300 at this point. We do it every day,” he said. “Every time I find one of these lunatics, I take away their visas.”
Rubio not specify how many visas belonged to people tied to the pro-Palestinian movement.
Mahmoud Khalil Taken to Central Louisiana ICE Processing Center
Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian activist and graduate student at Columbia University, was arrested at his apartment building in New York City on March 8. He is a prominent voice in campus activism and participated in a protest against Israel last year. Reports from the Associated Press indicate ICE agents also threatened to arrest Khalil’s wife, an American citizen who is eight months pregnant.
Khalil was first taken to a detention center in New Jersey before being taken approximately 1,000 miles away to the Central Louisiana ICE Processing Center in Jena. In a 2020 report, the U.S. Census reported Jena had a population of just over 4,000 people, according to CBS. On any given day, the Jena facility reportedly has at least 1,170 inmates, most of whom are immigration detainees.
Alireza Doroudi Taken to Central Louisiana ICE Processing Center
Alireza Doroudi, a doctoral student from Iran at the University of Alabama (UA), was arrested off campus by ICE agents on March 25. He was also transferred from Pickens County Jail to the Central Louisiana ICE Processing Center in Jena.
Doroudi, who studies mechanical engineering, reportedly entered the U.S. in January 2023 on an F-1 student visa issued by the U.S. Embassy in Oman. According to reports from The Crimson White, Doroudi’s visa was revoked six months after his arrival. Despite seeking advice from the University’s International Student and Scholar Services (ISSS), which reassured him of his legal standing to stay in the U.S. as long an he maintained his student status, Doroudi was detained.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security alleges Doroudi had his visa revoked because he posed significant national security risks.
In a March 28 email, Doroudi’s lawyer David Rozas said Doroudi has an active student visa for UA and is in the early stages of applying for employment-based immigration as a researcher, according to WVUA.
“He has not been arrested for any crime, nor has he participated in any anti-government protests,” Rozas wrote. “He is legally present in the U.S., pursuing his American dream by working towards his doctorate in mechanical engineering.”
Rumeysa Ozturk Taken to South Louisiana ICE Processing Center
Rumeysa Ozturk, a 30-year-old doctoral student from Turkey studying at Tufts University with a valid student visa, was also taken into custody on March 25 while along a street in the Boston suburb of Somerville. She was reportedly detained despite a court order to keep her in Massachusetts.
In a declaration filed April 10, Ozturk said the agents would not tell her why she was being arrested, noting one of them said, “We are not monsters. We do what the government tells us.” Ozturk also alleges the agents denied her request to speak with an attorney.
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Ozturk was taken to the South Louisiana ICE Processing Center in Basile, which holds female detainees. In court documents, her lawyers allege she was transferred to Louisiana without the administration notifying her legal team. The documents claim her location was withheld for nearly 24 hours.
Ozturk’s lawyers said moving her to Louisiana was consistent with “ICE’s pattern and practice of moving people detained for their speech to distant locations incommunicado and in secret.”
How Does the Federal Government Choose Where to Detain Immigrants?
Kathleen Bush-Joseph, a policy analyst with the U.S. Immigration Policy Program at the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank, told NBC that some considerations the federal government takes when placing immigrants in detention are how long they might be held, the availability of beds, and the person’s nationality.
“Deportation proceedings for people who are detained move much faster than those who are released, because the immigration courts prioritize those cases,” she said.
In court documents related to Khalil’s arrest, the Trump administration said overcrowded facilities and bedbugs in the New Jersey facility led to the decision to transport Khalil to the Jena facility.
Human Rights Abuses Reported at Louisiana ICE Facilities
In an Aug. 2024 report titled “Inside the Black Hole,” multiple human rights groups said they documented “systemic human rights abuses” against immigrants in detention facilities, including those in Jena and Basile.
“There was deprivation of human necessities, abusive and discriminatory treatment. There was medical abuse and neglect,” said Sarah Gillman, a co-author of the report and the director of Strategic U.S. Litigation at the nonprofit Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights.
Gillman said that the rights groups found immigrants previously detained in Louisiana lacked access to lawyers and faced other obstacles such as a lack of translators and having to prepare their own documents in their deportation cases in English, which some did not speak.
“We met many, many, many people who didn’t have access to lawyers who could help them, didn’t have access to their families, didn’t have access, really, to the outside world,” she said.
The report also documented that detainees have been exposed to unsanitary conditions, such as undrinkable water, moldy food, and inadequate access to hygiene supplies.
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A 2024 report from the Department of Homeland Security documented issues in the Basil facility, including mosquito infestations and lack of sufficient medical staff.
In 2018, Homeland Security investigated four deaths at the Jena detention center between 2016 and 2017, which the department identified as following a trend of delayed medical care, lack of training on suicide prevention, and a “failure of nursing staff to report abnormal vital signs.”
Yanik says the only state that has detained more immigrants than Louisiana is Texas. According to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, there are nearly 48,000 people in ICE custody nationwide with more than 7,000 being detained in nine Louisiana facilities.
“It is this warehousing of immigrants in rural, isolated, ‘out of sight, of mind’ locations,” Homero López, the legal director of Immigration Services and Legal Advocacy in Louisiana and a former appellate immigration judge, told The Guardian. “It’s difficult on attorneys, on family members, on community support systems to even get to folks. And therefore it’s a lot easier on government to present their case. They can just bulldoze people through the process.”
