The Cage Is the Same: Louisiana Takes the Lead in the Business of Immigration Detention

From the blocks of Angola State Penitentiary to the detention wings of ICE, Louisiana has long been in the business of caging human beings. Now, with the federal deportation machine accelerating, the state is leaning fully into its newest carceral frontier: immigration detention. The same cages (and new ones on the way), the same profiteers, the same isolation and abuse. In Louisiana, if you build the beds, they’ll find reasons to fill them, and keep them filled, fueling a sprawling detention network that depends on high occupancy, low oversight, and maximum disposability.

Louisiana locks up more people per capita than nearly any other state in the U.S., and unlike elsewhere, a majority of those incarcerated are held in local jails, with the state paying sheriffs a daily rate to warehouse them. As prison populations ballooned through the ’90s and early 2000s, some sheriffs outsourced state “prisoners” to private operators like GEO Group and LaSalle Corrections, embedding profit deeper into punishment. Even modest reforms, like Governor John Bel Edwards’ 2017 Justice Reinvestment Initiative (JRI) legislation that reduced the state prison population by more than 8,000 people, didn’t