‘Detention Alley’: inside the Ice centres in the US south where foreign students and undocumented migrants languish

Behind the reinforced doors of courtroom number two, at a remote detention centre in central Louisiana, Lu Xianying sat alone before an immigration judge unable to communicate.

Dressed in a blue jumpsuit that drooped from his slight frame, he waited as court staff called three different translation services, unable to find an interpreter proficient in his native Gan Chinese.

Like almost all of the 17 detainees appearing before Judge Kandra Robbins during removal proceedings on Tuesday morning, Lu had no attorney because there is no right to legal representation in US immigration proceedings. He sat silently, evidently confused. A substitute interpreter was eventually found, and began translating the judge’s questions into Mandarin.

“I am afraid to return to China,” he told the court, as he described how he had already filed an asylum application after crossing the border into Texas in March 2024. Lu said he was worried a lawyer had stolen his money and not submitted his asylum claim. Lu, who had only recently been detained, struggled to understand, as the judge asked him to list his country of return should he be deported.

“Right now my order is to be removed?” He asked. “Or should I go to court?”

The judge explained that he was present in court, and provided him another asylum application form. His next hearing was scheduled for April.

The LaSalle immigration court, inside a sprawling Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) detention centre in rural Jena, Louisiana, has been thrust into the spotlight in recent weeks after the former Columbia graduate student Mahmoud Khalil was transferred here earlier this month. His case has drawn international attention as the Trump administration attempts to deport the pro-Palestinian activist under rarely used executive provisions of US immigration law. The government is fighting vigorously to keep Khalil’s case in Louisiana and he is due to appear again at the LaSalle court for removal proceedings on 8 April.

An Ice detention facility in Jena, Louisiana, on 21 March. Photograph: Stephen Smith/AP

But it has also renewed focus on the network of remote immigration detention centres that stretch between Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi, known as “Detention Alley” – where 14 of the country’s 20 largest detention centres are clustered. And now where other students have since been sent after being arrested thousands of miles away.

Badar Khan Suri, a research student at Georgetown University, was arrested in Virginia last week and sent to a detention centre in Alexandria, Louisiana, and then on to another site, Prairieland in eastern Texas. This week, Rumeysa Ozturk, a doctoral student at Tufts University, was arrested in Massachusetts and sent to the South Louisiana Ice processing centre in the swamplands of Evangeline parish.

These distant detention facilities and court systems have long been associated with rights violations, poor medical treatment and due process concerns, which advocates argue are only likely to intensify during the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown and promise to carry out mass deportations that has already led to a surge in the detention population. But rarely do cases within these centres attract much public attention or individual scrutiny.

“Most of the folks in detention in Louisiana aren’t the ones making the news,” said Andrew Perry, an immigrant rights attorney at the ACLU of Louisiana. “But they are experiencing similar, if not the same, treatment as those who are.”

To observe a snapshot of the more than 1,100 other detainees confined at the facility also holding Khalil, the Guardian travelled to Jena and witnessed a full day inside the LaSalle court, which is rarely visited by journalists. Dozens lined up for their short appearances before a judge and were sworn in en masse. Some expressed severe health concerns, others frustration over a lack of legal representation. Many had been transferred to the centre from states hundreds of miles away.

Earlier in the morning Wilfredo Espinoza, a migrant from Honduras, appeared before Judge Robbins for a procedural update on his asylum case that was due for a full hearing in May. Espinoza, who coughed throughout his appearance and had a small bandage on his face, had no lawyer and informed the court he wished to abandon his asylum application “because of my health”. The circumstances of his detention and timing and location of his arrest by Ice were not made clear in court.

He suffered from hypertension and fatty liver disease, he said through a Spanish translator. “I’ve had three issues with my heart here,” he said. “I don’t want to be here any more. I can’t be locked up for this long. I want to leave.”

The judge asked him repeatedly if he was entering his decision of his own free will. “Yes,” he said. “I just want to leave here as quickly as possible.”

The judge ordered his removal from the US.

Substantiated allegations of medical neglect have plagued the Jena facility for years. In 2018, the civil rights division of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) examined the circumstances of four fatalities at the facility, which is operated by the Geo Group, a private corrections company. All four deaths occurred between January 2016 and March 2017 and the DHS identified a pattern of delay in medical care, citing “failure of nursing staff to report abnormal vital signs”.

At the South Louisiana Ice processing centre, an all-female facility that is also operated by the Geo Group and where Ozturk is now being held, the ACLU of Louisiana recently filed a complaint to the DHS’s civil rights division alleging an array of rights violations. These included inadequate access to medical care, with the complaint stating: “Guards left detained people suffering from severe conditions like external bleeding, tremors, and sprained limbs unattended to, refusing them access to diagnostic care”.

The complaint was filed in December 2024, before the Trump administration moved to gut the DHS’s civil rights division earlier this month.

A spokesperson for the Geo Group said the company “strongly disagrees with the allegations that have been made regarding services we provide at Geo-contracted Ice processing centres” including the facility in Jena.

“In all instances, our contracted services are monitored by the federal government to ensure strict compliance with applicable federal standards,” the spokesperson said, pointing to Ice’s performance-based national detention standards that the company’s contracts are governed by.

The spokesperson added: “These allegations are part of a longstanding, politically motivated, and radical campaign to abolish Ice and end federal immigration detention by attacking the federal government’s immigration facility contracts.”

The DHS did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Louisiana experienced a surge in immigration detention during the first Trump administration. At the end of 2016, the state had capacity for a little more than 2,000 immigrant detainees, which more than doubled within two years. A wave of new Ice detention centres opened in remote, rural locations often at facilities previously used as private prisons. The state now holds the second largest number of detained immigrants, behind only Texas. Almost 7,000 people were held as of February 2025 at nine facilities in Louisiana, all operated by private companies.

“It is this warehousing of immigrants in rural, isolated, ‘out of sight, of mind’ locations,” said Homero López, the legal director of Immigration Services and Legal Advocacy in Louisiana and a former appellate immigration judge. “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.”

At the LaSalle court this week, the Guardian observed detainees transferred from states as far away as Arizona, Florida and Tennessee. In an afternoon hearing, where 15 detainees made an application for bond, which would release them from custody and transfer their case to a court closer to home, only two were granted.

Cases heard from detention are far less likely to result in relief. At LaSalle, 78.6% of asylum cases are rejected, compared with the national average of 57.7%, according to the Trac immigration data project. In Judge Robbins’s court, 52% of asylum applicants appear without an attorney.

In the afternoon session, the court heard from Fernando Altamarino, a Mexican national, who was transferred to Jena from Panama City, Florida, more than 500 miles away. Altamarino had no criminal record, like almost 50% of immigrants currently detained by Ice. He had been arrested by agents about a month ago, after he received a traffic ticket following a minor car accident.

He tried to resolve the matter at his local courthouse, and was instead detained by immigration authorities. Via his lawyer, the court heard his application for release. A letter from a leader in his local church described his role as a stalwart member of the congregation and “a man who truly embodies faith”.

But a prosecutor for the DHS, who opposed all but one bond application that afternoon, argued that Altamarino, who had lived in the country for more than a decade, presented a flight risk due to his “very limited to non-existent family ties to the US”.

The judge concurred, as Altamarino sat upright and listened through a translator. Despite acknowledging he was “not a danger to community”, she sided with the government and denied bond.

Altamarino thanked the judge as he left the room, under watch of a guard. The heavy door closed behind him as he headed back into the void of America’s vast detention system.