At least three students recently arrested by the Trump administration and have taken deportation procedures to highly remote detention centers in the rural areas of Louisiana that human rights groups have called “a black hole.”
The students Mahmoud Khalil, Rumeysa Ozturb and Alireza Doroudi were arrested near their homes, then took hundreds of miles away For the desolate rural detention centers in a state that, since the first administration of President Donald Trump, he has become an increasingly critical part of the country’s immigrant detention apparatus.
The federal government has a wide authority to transfer immigrants who face deportation to different facilities. But defenders and experts said there have been great human rights abuses in the facilities of this region and that the Trump administration has sent students to a very conservative jurisdiction that is very favorable to its immigration policy objectives.
“They are being placed in facilities that have quite horrible conditions, many difficulties with access to lawyers and in what really is 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 the Tulane Law Faculty in New Orleans. Yanik is also an associate professor of law at the university.
The National Security Department did not comment on their decision to stop students in Louisiana, accusations against the facilities in the State or the role played by these facilities on the Administration’s immigration agenda. The White House did not respond to a request for comments. In judicial documents related to Khalil’s arrest, the Administration said that overpopulated facilities and bugs in the Northeast led to their decision to send it to Louisiana.
Khalil, a permanent legal resident and pro-Palestinian protest leader at Columbia University, was arrested in his apartment building in New York City on March 8, before being transferred to a detention center in New Jersey and then led to about 1,000 miles to the Ice processing center of Central Louisiana in Jena, Louisiana.
Khalil’s lawyers are fighting to return to the northeast and released in a case that defies their arrest and detention that recently moved to a New Jersey court. Meanwhile, their separate deportation procedures have begun to play in front of an immigration judge in Louisiana.
Last week, Alireza Doroudi, a doctoral student from Iran who studied at the University of Alabama, was arrested outside the campus by federal immigration authorities with little known about his case. Since then, Doroudi has also revealed that Doroudi was also taken to the Louisian ice processing center in Jena also took Doroudi that Doroudi was also taken to the Louisiana Central Ice Processing Center in Jena.
On the same day, the doctoral student at the University of Tufts, Rumeysa Ozturb, a Turkish citizen who was in the United States with a valid student visa, was taken from the street on his way to break his Ramadan fasting with friends in an arrest by civilly captured video agents.
It was taken to the ice processing center of southern Louisiana in Basile, Louisiana, which contains female detainees.
Ozturb was transferred to Louisiana without the administration notifying their legal team, their lawyers said in judicial documents. The documents say that their location was retained for almost 24 hours. Their lawyers said that moving Ozturb to Louisiana was consistent with “the ice pattern and the practice of transferring people detained for their speech to distant places that incommuniciate and secretly.”
The Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, said last week that the State Department has revoked 300 or more visas of students, since the White House is increasingly addressed to students born abroad whose main transgression seems to be activism. The administration has accused some of the students to participate in activities and activism that support Hamas, that students and their lawyers deny.
Some considerations that the Federal Government takes by placing immigrants in detention are how long someone could be in detention, the current availability of beds and the nationality of a person, said Kathleen Bush-Joseph, policy analyst of the United States immigration policy program at the United States Institute at the Institute of Migration Policy, a non-partisan thought tank.
“Deportation procedures for detained people move much faster than those released, because immigration courts prioritize those cases,” he said.
Louisiana became a center to keep thousands of immigrants into ice custody during Trump’s first mandate, since the administration expanded the arrest of migrants and asylum seekers.
“Louisiana has arrested more immigrants than any other state, except Texas,” Yanik said.
There are currently more than 7,000 immigrants arrested by ICE in Louisiana, according to the Compensation House for access to transactional records based at the University of Syracuse. There are almost 48,000 people in ice custody throughout the country, the highest number since 2019.
Human Rights Abuse Reports
NBC News has previously informed about accusations of human rights abuse in Louisiana detention centers. In 2024, a report from the National Security Department documented problems in the Basil Center, including a mosquito infestation and the lack of sufficient medical personnel.
In an August 2024 report, “Inside The Black Hole” Multiple groups said they documented “systemic human rights abuses” against immigrants in the facilities, which included the detention centers in Jena and Basile where they have taken students.
“There was deprivation of human needs, abusive and discriminatory treatment. There was medical abuse and negligence,” said Sarah Gillman, co -author of the report and director of strategic litigation of the United States in the non -profit organization Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights.
The report and others have documented for years that the detainees are also exposed to unhealthy conditions, including yellow and indescribable water; Mohosa food; Insect infestations; and inappropriate access to basic hygiene supplies.
Gillman said the rights groups also found that in past cases, immigrants arrested in Louisiana lacked access to lawyers and faced other important obstacles, such as the lack of translators and having to prepare important documents in their cases of deportation in English, a language that some of them did not speak.
“We met many, many, many people who did not have access to lawyers who could help them, did not have access to their families, had no access to the outside world,” he said.
Geo Group, who directs the facilities where students are arrested, did not immediately respond to a request for comments on the accusations in the report.
ICE did not immediately respond to a request for comments on the report and accusations of human rights abuse at its Louisiana facilities. But previously he told NBC News during the Biden Administration that “it undertakes to promote safe, safe and human environments for those in their custody very serious: the agency provides a comprehensive policy and a strict supervision for administrative custody of one of the transitory and various populations of any system correction or detention in the world in the world and retains the continuous firm of many relevant factors for the world continuous of each of its operations of its operations. “
Students arrested in Louisiana are in deportation procedures before an immigration judge, in a judicial system that is separated from the criminal justice system. The concern of the lawyers and defenders of immigration is that any appeal in the cases of the students would be under the 5th Court of Appeals of the United States Circuit, which is among the most conservative jurisdictions in the country.
The jurisdiction where an immigrant is arrested has “very different precedents that can really affect the results of immigrants and requests for everything, from the release of detention, to the concession of asylum or other immigration benefits,” said Bush-Joseph.
