“My name is Mahmoud Khalil and I am a political prisoner. I am writing to you from a detention facility in Louisiana where I wake to cold mornings and spend long days bearing witness to the quiet injustices underway against a great many people precluded from the protections of the law.”
In recent weeks, students Mahmoud Khalil, Rümeysa Öztürk, and Alireza Doroudi were abducted by ICE and are being held in ICE detention centers in rural Louisiana. Khalil’s powerful statement connects multiple realities that demonstrate how state repression is activated to support the rise of authoritarianism.
That Khalil and others are being sent to detention centers in remote towns across Louisiana is not an accident. Rising authoritarianism requires a police state, and the expansion of prisons, police, and detention centers is extremely profitable. As the current U.S. government disappears people to a brutal prison camp in El Salvador, they are also moving people to rural Louisiana in attempts to disappear people within the United States borders.
The South’s history of slavery, incarceration, white supremacist social control, and people’s consistent resistance are all part of a blueprint that can help us understand what is happening, why, who benefits, and how to fight back.
Why Louisiana Matters: isolation, legal strategy, & profit
To understand why these detention center locations matter, we have to understand the U.S. prison system rooted in racial control, economic exploitation, and geographic erasure.
Khalil and Doroudi are both being detained at the Central Louisiana ICE Processing Center in Jena, Louisiana. Öztürk is being held at the South Louisiana ICE Processing Center in Basile, Louisiana. Both detention centers are located in remote, rural, predominantly-white towns with less than a few thousand people. These locations present significant challenges for these detainees, as the centers are far from major cities, as well as far from many legal advocates and human rights organizations.
This isolation is deliberate and strategic, positioning detainees thousands of miles from their support networks and significantly limiting access to legal counsel—making it far more difficult to build an effective defense. These sites also face less public scrutiny, as media outlets and advocacy organizations have limited access to monitor conditions and report on what occurs inside. With less opportunities for family visits, detainees become increasingly cut off from the outside world—isolated both emotionally and physically. Rural detention becomes another method of “disappearing” people.
In recent years, Louisiana has emerged as one of the nation’s leading hubs for immigrant detention, ranking just behind Texas in the number of people held in custody. Louisiana currently holds about 7,000 immigrants in civil detention. Louisiana, along with its neighbors Texas and Mississippi, house 14 of the 20 largest ICE detention centers in the country, and also have extremely conservative courts.
Repressive administrations love the well-known conservative 5th Circuit Court in Louisiana and can often get the outcomes they want more readily than in other states. It was a federal judge in Louisiana who ruled that Khalil can be deported as a national security risk by virtue of his beliefs and protests in support of Palestine. An immigration judge in Jena recently denied bond to Doroudi. In contrast, the federal judge in New York ruled that the detainment of Yunseo Chung was unlawful.
The detention centers function as tools of punishment in their own right. Over the years, several facilities in rural Louisiana have faced serious criticism for human rights violations. Öztürk has reported experiencing “unsanitary, unsafe, and inhumane” conditions at the Basile facility, where she has struggled to access adequate medical care. Investigators have documented abuses at this center that include detainees being denied medical care, receiving inadequate feminine hygiene supplies, and being served spoiled food.
These centers do more than disappear, contain, and punish. Then and now, the private prison mega-corporation GEO Group owns and manages the Central Louisiana ICE Processing Center in Jena (as well as the South Louisiana ICE Processing Center in Basile), as for-profit detention centers. Formerly known as Wackenhut Corrections Corporation, infamous in the 1990s as a major player in the rise of privatized, for-profit prisons, GEO Group purchased Wackenhut in 2002. GEO Group, the largest weapons manufacturer in the world, currently has close to a billion dollars worth of multi-year government contracts for prisons, detention centers, transport, and surveillance.
A target itself, like Israel, of divestment strategies to protest systematic violence, torture, forced labor, and abuse, GEO Group stands to gain billions more in federal contracts as the Trump administration criminalizes and rounds up immigrants, Black people, Muslims, and students.
Sent Down South: from slave port to incarceration capital to detention
Louisiana was a key site in the domestic slave trade, with New Orleans serving as the second largest slave port and the largest slave market in the country where enslaved people were bought, sold, and transported across the U.S. South.
During slavery, there was a phrase often used by enslavers as a threat to the enslaved: to be “sold down the river.” This meant being sold further south along the Mississippi River to Deep South plantations, such as Louisiana’s infamous sugarcane fields. For the enslaved, this phrase carried the weight of a death sentence, symbolizing separation from family and near-certain suffering. To be sentenced further “South” was a tool of isolation, punishment, and fear, a centerpiece of slave-era control.
In the years following Emancipation, this exploitation evolved rather than disappeared, laying the groundwork for the state’s central role in the rise of mass incarceration. From convict leasing and Jim Crow-era penal labor to the modern prison-industrial complex, Louisiana has long profited from systems that criminalize and commodify Black bodies. In fact, Louisiana was home to the nation’s first privatized prison in 1844, a facility that later contracted formerly-enslaved labor for profit.
The slave-era legacy is perhaps most vividly embodied today by the infamous Louisiana State Penitentiary—better known as “Angola”—the largest maximum-security prison in the United States. It sits on a remote 18,000-acre site of a former slave plantation, and continues to operate its farm using prison labor. Incarcerated men—mostly Black—work the land picking such crops as cotton, often for pennies an hour in harsh, hot, inhumane conditions, overseen by armed prison guards on horseback. It’s a grim image, mirrored on the Texas border in 2021 when U.S. Border Patrol agents carried whips on horseback to chase and capture Haitian immigrants.
Advocacy groups pushing for criminal justice reform played a key role in reducing Louisiana’s prison population in recent years. But now, immigration detention is threatening to replace those declining numbers, especially in rural areas.
The rise of immigrant detention in Louisiana parallels the historical use of rural Southern prisons and labor camps to disappear marginalized people from public view. ICE facilities in Louisiana are participating in a modern-day form of racial control by detaining immigrants and political dissenters: these facilities are turned into sites where stolen bodies are locked away for profit and punishment—out of sight, out of mind.
These Louisiana detention centers continue the logic of American slavery: Black and brown bodies, confined and exploited in rural parishes for profit. The architects of the United States’ immigration policy have begun to modernize what Louisiana has perfected for centuries: control through punishment, profit through imprisonment, and silence through isolation.
It is not a coincidence that so many of the pro-Palestine organizers have been sent to Louisiana. But there is another side to Southern history that could guide our response. Resistance works.
Why Jena Matters: a nexus of repression and resistance
When we talk about rising fascism in the U.S. and across the world, we remember that the U.S. South designed the blueprint for much of European fascism and South African apartheid in the form of slavery and Jim Crow. Interlocking systems of white supremacy still exist in the social realm, at the schools, within the police, and in the courts. The ‘Jena 6’ case shows all of those systems protecting white racism and attempting to contain Black outrage.
Prior to its recent spotlight, the small town of Jena, Louisiana was best known for the case of the Jena 6. In 2006, after nooses were hung from the “white tree” at Jena High School, six Black students were arrested and charged with attempted murder for allegedly beating up a white kid in the midst of escalating racial tensions. The jury was all white, and 17-year-old Mychal Bell was tried as an adult and found guilty. The case became a flashpoint, as the ruling sparked national outrage at the racial injustice on display. Twenty thousand people showed up in the small Louisiana town on the day of Bell’s sentencing to protest the trial.
The racial tensions and violence related to the Jena 6 began just a year after Hurricane Katrina exposed the realities of racism, decades after the gains of the civil rights movement. “Katrina made black people realize that we are second class citizens in this country. It gave eyes to the suffering that black people endure. When their shelters and livelihoods were taken away, they were called looters and left to die,” Assata Richards of the University of Pittsburgh noted in relation to the rising tensions in Jena at that time.
The Jena 6 case also shows the power of protest, organizing, and movement building. Over 20,000 people descended on Jena in September 2007. Over 100 campuses across the country staged protests and walkouts. These massive Black youth-led protests were harbingers of Black Lives Matter protests and racial justice uprisings to come.
Though they were charged with attempted murder, and Bell was tried as an adult, Bell’s charges were eventually overturned and the other Black teen boys were merely fined. When we organize and refuse to allow repressive systems to isolate and disappear our people, we can win.
Jena, Louisiana, and the privatized prison industry that is housing pro-Palestinian activists represent a nexus of systems that reinforce white supremacy, prison profiteering, and anti-protest repression. It reflects a continued legacy of targeting marginalized people, especially Black and brown bodies, for punishment and control.
Jena signals the multifaceted reality of racist state repression and social violence, but it can also be a reminder of the power of organizing to stop injustice.
Why we need to pay attention
The disappearance and detentions of pro-Palestine organizers are a direct punishment for the powerful youth-led encampments of Spring 2024. As we continue to show our power in this time period, we will contend with more repression. Over 40 anti-protest bills have been introduced in 2025 across the U.S. These laws would compound existing laws targeting protest, nonprofit organizations, mutual aid, and bail funds.
As movements rise, state repression increases. And private corporations are poised to profit. GEO Group stock price doubled after the November election.
The prison industrial complex is a major target that we can organize to dismantle. The pervasiveness of the police state and prison systems broadens the base of people who are affected and can be organized to resist. From ICE detention centers to surveillance in our neighborhoods, almost every community is affected. Students in high school and middle school have to contend with more police presence. The criminalization of dissent is getting codified at all levels of local, state, and federal legislation.
Movement protests in 2007 changed the outcome of the case for the Jena 6 and advanced racial justice. We cannot be silent today as people are isolated, contained, and deported. We have to be brave, and we have to do it collectively.
Daily news of disappearances, detentions, and further criminalization of movement activity can be daunting. Understanding the current and historical connections is critical, and our strategies are stronger when they are rooted in a clear analysis of what’s happening, who benefits, and what forces are affected and in motion. Our responsibility in this moment of multilayered danger is to assess the connections and patterns in order to act decisively and strategically.
As organizers, we ask: Why are people being abducted and sent to faraway prisons? Who benefits materially from the expanded police state? What can we learn from history about how the opposition moves? What can we learn from movements in the U.S. and globally that have confronted authoritarian states?
As organizers we know: Movement solidarity is required to prevent and dismantle authoritarianism and the prison system that is necessary to keep it in place. Find out what forms of police, surveillance, prison, and detention expansion are happening in your community and organize to expose and eliminate them.
The Zionist project reaches far beyond the state of Israel and its genocide in Gaza. As the U.S. supports and aids the genocide, state violence increases to contain our resistance. Students across the country are fighting back against heightened repression and disciplinary measures, and universities are contending with existential threats on their autonomy and freedom. One example of the reach of Zionism in the U.S. is the Georgia International Law Enforcement Exchange (GILEE), a police exchange program based on a university campus that trains U.S. police in apartheid military tactics, and expands Israeli surveillance technologies in Atlanta. But the students at Georgia State University are organizing to end the program.
Young people make the connections and show us all how to be brave–from the high school students walking out to protest the racism of the Jena 6 trials to those fighting Cop City in Atlanta to 2024’s encampments. Solidarity and support for youth and student organizing in this time is critical for us all to be free.
A political prisoner in today’s rise of authoritarian control, Mahmoud Khalil reminds us: “Students have long been at the forefront of change — leading the charge against the Vietnam War, standing on the frontlines of the civil rights movement, and driving the struggle against apartheid in South Africa. Today, too, even if the public has yet to fully grasp it, it is students who steer us toward truth and justice.
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