Trump administration to expand ICE detention into notorious Angola prison

The Trump administration plans to detain immigrants in the nation’s largest maximum-security prison – a Louisiana lock-up with a notorious history as a “prison plantation.”

Louisiana has played a key role in federal immigration enforcement for years as the state with the second-highest number of ICE detention centers outside Texas. The Louisiana State Penitentiary – better known as Angola – stands to become the state’s 10th ICE detention site.

On Sept. 3, top Trump administration officials are scheduled to meet Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry outside the 6,300-bed prison located two hours northwest of New Orleans at a bend in the Mississippi River.

The prison emerged in the late 1800s from the consolidation of four plantations to become a prison farm where prisoners would do the work once done by enslaved people, according to research by Justin Hosbey at the University of California.

A scholarly article housed in the Department of Justice’s own virtual library refers to Angola as a “prison plantation.”

The agreement between U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Louisiana mirrors similar deals struck on immigration detention between Republican-led states and the Trump administration. They include the now-shuttered “Alligator Alcatraz” detention camp in the Florida Everglades and 1,000 beds at a correctional facility in Indiana the administration is calling the “Speedway Slammer.”

ICE officials have said they’re looking to secure 80,000 new immigration detention beds in existing prison facilities and on military bases, on top of the 41,500 immigration detention beds already in the system, as part of a massive expansion of immigrant detention.

This summer, Congress provided $45 billion to ICE to pay for it – a war chest three times greater than what the agency previously had for detention, according to the American Immigration Council.

Angola is notorious not only for its history but for its present.

Prisoners sued the Louisiana prison system in 2023 over conditions on what’s known at Angola as the “farm line,” where inmates are forced to work the fields under the watchful eye of armed guards. Last year, a federal judge ordered the prison to put more protections in place to safeguard prisoners in conditions of extreme heat.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, Attorney General Pam Bondi and ICE Deputy Director Madison Sheahan are expected to tour the Angola prison Sept. 3.

DHS didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

ICE is currently holding a record 61,226 people in immigration detention at more than 190 facilities nationwide, according to an analysis of detention data by Austin Kocher, an immigration researcher at Syracuse University.

The use of a maximum-security prison to detain immigrants “promotes the administration’s big lie that people in immigration detention are ‘criminals,'” Nora Ahmed, legal director of the ACLU of Louisiana, told USA TODAY. “So many who come to this country try to follow the legal pathways we have put in place, but still end up in detention.”

The latest data shows that nearly half, or 45%, of people in ICE detention have no criminal record or pending charges. Because ICE holds immigrants with alleged civil violations of immigration law, the agency’s standards require that detention be “non-punitive,” or not punishing.

This is a developing story.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Louisiana’s Angola mega prison to hold immigrant detainees for ICE