BIRMINGHAM, Ala. — Louisiana is a town that is about 200 miles northwest of New Orleans.
The U.S. Census said in its 2020 report that there were just over 4,000 people living in Jena. But if you go a little further down Pinehill Road, you’ll reach the Central Louisiana ICE Processing Center, which is also known as the Jena/LaSalle Detention Facility. It’s home to at least 1,170 prisoners every day, most of whom are people whose identity in the U.S. is being questioned.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers took Alireza Doroudi, a 32-year-old doctoral student in mechanical engineering at the University of Alabama, to the Jena facility last Friday. It took them over 5.5 hours to get him there from the Pickens County Jail in Carrollton, where he had been since ICE officers picked him up outside of his home in Tuscaloosa on Tuesday morning. Speaking out for Palestinian rights, Mahmoud Khalil, a graduate of Columbia University who was arrested earlier this month in New Jersey, is living in the same place.
Following claims from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security that he posed “significant national security risks,” Doroudi is staying in the facility. This is because his visa was canceled months after he arrived in the U.S. from Iran in January 2023. David Rozas, Doroudi’s lawyer, said that his client has not been charged with anything and that even though his visa was canceled, he could have stayed in the country legally as long as he was in school.
Rozas told the Associated Press, “He has not been arrested for any crime and has not taken part in any anti-government protests.” He is officially in the U.S. and working toward his Ph.D. in mechanical engineering to follow his American dream.
Over the years, the building has had its fair share of problems. Between 2016 and 2017, four people died at the jail. In 2018, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security looked into what happened and found that medical care was delayed, there wasn’t enough training on how to prevent suicide, and “nurses failed to report abnormal vital signs.” The story was found during an investigation by NPR in 2023.
Oliver Laughland, the Southern bureau chief for The Guardian, wrote an article on Saturday about immigration court hearings at LaSalle. The article put the facility in the setting of “Detention Alley,” which is a term used to describe many ICE centers in the Southeast.
“These faraway detention centers and court systems have long been linked to violations of human rights, poor medical care, and concerns about due process. Supporters say these problems are only going to get worse during the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigration and promise to carry out mass deportations, which has already caused a rise in the number of people in detention,” Laughland wrote. “But cases in these centers don’t usually get a lot of attention from the public or from individuals.”
A report from the Louisiana Illuminator in 2023 said that the jail’s suicide watch unit had cells that were “secured behind a large metal door with a small rectangular window for guards to look through” and a small window that looked out into the yard and let in a “sliver of sunlight.”
“There’s not even a little bit of warmth inside.” “It’s all just metal and concrete,” said Mich Gonzalez, who was the Associate Executive Director of Freedom for Immigrants at the time. “It looks a lot like a concrete cage.”
When it first opened in 2007, the Jena facility was Louisiana’s second biggest ICE facility.
There is no word on when Doroudi’s first hearing for immigration will be.
