‘Louisiana is where people go to be disappeared’
He arrived in Alexandria exhausted and sick.
It was early April, and Amilcar Lisser-Posadas – shackled at his hands and feet – had been transferred from a nearby immigration detention center to this remote US immigration facility in Louisiana. He feared it would be his last stop before deportation.
He remembered the stench of the place. The packed jail rooms where hundreds of men were warehoused together with little access to showers, which sometimes spouted brown, rusty water – when they worked.
The 29-year-old, a father of two young daughters who are US citizens, had come to the US from Honduras and had previously been protected under the Obama-era program known as Daca (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals), which halted deportation for many undocumented people who arrived in the US as children. He had entered as a nine-year-old but his Daca protection had lapsed.
In March, Lisser-Posadas was apprehended by police in Shelby county, Tennessee, for driving with an expired license and was turned over to US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice). He had no prior criminal record. For four weeks he was moved around various Ice detention centers. He filed a legal request to Ice for permission to remain in the country, citing fears of targeted violence in Honduras. He received no response.
The Alexandria Staging Facility – as it is formally called – was “just not a place for human beings”, he said in a phone interview.
The isolated, Ice staging facility in rural central Louisiana has emerged as a hub of the Trump administration’s deportation machine. The center, which has operated since 2014, is run by the private corrections giant Geo Group. It is considered a “black hole”, by many lawyers, advocates and former detainees interviewed by the Guardian. Living conditions are deplorable, many former detainees have alleged, and there is almost no legal access to the center.
A four-month Guardian US investigation into the Alexandria facility has revealed a pattern of alleged due process violations, previously unreported accounts of neglect and abuse, documented health emergencies and long stays, despite the center’s intended use as a short-term detention facility. It also found that the facility adopted a temporary and unexplained change to normal medical standards earlier this year that protect detainees’ welfare. Reporters relied on court documents, public records, internal Department of Homeland Security (DHS) statistics, 911 calls and interviews with 10 people either formerly detained or deported from the Alexandria facility, or those with loved ones held there.
The investigation also reviewed leaked flight manifests from Ice’s largest airline contractor, Global Crossings (GlobalX). They underscore the critical role the Alexandria facility, which is within the grounds of a small regional airport, has played in Ice’s mission of rapidly transferring and deporting hundreds of thousands of immigrants. The data, which covers roughly 100 days from Donald Trump’s second inauguration, shows that more than 20,000 migrant detainees passed through the Alexandria airport on Ice charters operated by the carrier at a rate of almost 200 a day.
“Louisiana is where people go to be disappeared,” said Nora Ahmed, legal director of the ACLU of Louisiana. “My concern about the Alexandria facility is [that] it is a black box.”
Visitors are not permitted, and it is the kind of place where mistakes can happen, giving officials “a convenient excuse to wrongly deport people”, Ahmed added.
“The only way to stop that is for people to have access to attorneys.” [Continue reading…]