Students and immigrant scholars are arrested in remote facilities in Louisiana for objections

While the US authorities fall on immigrants in universities in a fervor against pro-Palestinian protests, they quickly scored some of those held in remote structures in Louisiana.

Lawyers For Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia University Graduated student who faces the possible deportation for his role in protests in that campus, he is calling his imprisonment in Louisiana a “kafkaesque” attempt to cool freedom of speech.

Louisiana is emerging as a pivot for immigrant detention in the second mandate of President Donald Trump, in structures far from New Orleans and beyond the immediate scope of most groups of rights and lawyers.

Epicenter for detention

The detention of immigrants in Louisiana has increased during Trump’s first term in structures adapted by state prisons and local prisons.

At the time, a revision of state criminal justice had reduced the prison population, threatening the economies of small cities that rely on the blocks.

The officials of the rural parishes have signed contracts for the detention of immigrants who have guaranteed millions of payments to local governments. Immigrants and their supporters complained of prolonged detention, mistreatment and isolation, including the solitary confinement that sometimes caused death.

Louisiana is the state n. 2 Today for immigrant detention from Ice, after Texas. About 7000 immigrants are kept there in civil detention, according to the government data compiled by the transactional registers of Syracuse University Access Clearinghouse.

Taken from north -est to the south

Khalil’s transfer from the New York area to Louisiana complicates his legal struggle to be released.

A lawyer from the Department of Justice, August Flentje, wants the controlled dispute in Louisiana “for jurisdictional certainty”. A judge in Newark, New Jersey, listened to jurisdictional topics on Friday and plans to issue a written sentence.

The immigration authorities also hold Rumeysa Ozturk’s Turkish student in a detention center in Basile, about 170 miles (270 kilometers) west of New Orleans.

The doctoral student of Tufts University was held by immigration officials while walking on a road in the suburb of Boston di Somerville Tuesday and moved to Louisiana before a federal judge ordered her to keep in Massachusetts.

The lawyers of another detained scholar, Alireza Doroudi, a doctoral student at the University of Alabama, said on Friday that he would probably have been sent to an ice center in Jena, Louisiana, a city of about 5,000 that is also far from the main cities.

Doroudi, 32, initially held in the Prison of the County Pickens in Carrollton, Alabama, after his arrest by immigration agents in his apartment in the middle of the night.

Doroudi was collected because a visa was revoked in 2023 and his lawyers claim to have never participated in campus protests. The National Security Department said that Doroudi represents a “significant threat to national security” but has not developed.

Relatively few immigrants establish themselves in Louisiana. Residents of foreign origin represent less than 5% of the population, compared to the national average of about 13%.

Detention for immigration is at most five years

The executive orders and promises of Trump of the inauguration of the mass deportations of “millions and millions” of people depend on the guarantee of more money for the detention beds of immigrants.

The number of immigrants in the detention of the ice this month hit 47,892 – the highest since October 2019 – while the administration has experienced the use of offshore structures in the naval station of Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The authorities are also using federal prisons to retain some people, returning to a strategy that aroused accusations of mistreatment during Trum’s first term. The administration also resumed the family detention of immigrants in a South Texas structure after a break from the biden era.