EDITOR’S NOTE: Nora Ahmed joined the ACLU of Louisiana as Legal Director in 2020. She has helped to build the organization’s policing, immigration, voting rights, and First Amendment dockets from the ground up. Under her leadership, the Justice Lab program has secured nearly $1.5 million in settlements for police brutality victims and changed Louisiana’s statute of limitations after two Supreme Court cases, expanding constitutional protections for thousands of Louisianans. She’s now leading the newest iteration of Justice Lab focused on freeing immigrants wrongfully detained in Louisiana’s carceral system.
Last year on October 30, I drove six hours to an immigration detention facility at night, looking for my 18-year-old client, Juan. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) kidnapped Juan, who uses a pseudonym due to age and privacy concerns, off the street in New York while he was on his way to work. ICE then sent him to Louisiana where he languished in the Jackson Parish Correctional Center for nearly three months. Driving up to the facility at 11 p.m., I had a federal court order in hand, signed by a judge who had ordered Juan’s immediate release. But when I showed up, the correction officers refused to set him free. So, in the middle of the night, our partner attorneys and I filed a motion alleging ICE was disobeying the court order. The next morning, we secured Juan’s freedom.
Here in Louisiana, we often refer to the state as the “black hole” of immigration detention, where people simply disappear. According to some estimates, over 60,000 people have been trapped by this system annually. Immigrants detained in Louisiana face abhorrent conditions, along with a lack of access to legal support. It took a while for our team to get to the point of trying to free a client in the middle of the night in rural Louisiana. But against innumerable odds, we have been able to release dozens of people from immigration detention centers here over the years — through parole applications, advocacy, litigation, assistance for people representing themselves in court, and habeas petitions. A habeas petition asks the federal court to order the release of someone in immigration detention who has been wrongfully detained. While thousands who deserve justice remain left behind, the ACLU of Louisiana is expanding our work to connect them with crucial immigration services and obtain their freedom.
Building immigration work from the ground up in Louisiana
Through years of intentional relationship building, my colleagues and I were able to gain a foothold within this black hole. We now understand how it works in ways we did not a few years back. As the Trump administration has cracked down on immigration and used Louisiana as the center of its mass deportation campaign, our foothold has allowed us to expose injustices from within, while continuing to free wrongfully detained immigrants.
When I joined the ACLU of Louisiana during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, I was tasked with building out our immigration practice. A critical first step in my role as legal director was to seek out the people already doing legal support on the ground, including the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), Immigration Services and Legal Advocacy (ISLA), and other local advocates. While working with these groups, and the current Director of Strategic U.S. Litigation at the Robert & Ethel Kennedy Human Rights Center, I quickly learned that local organizations were stretched thin. In fact, when we first began our immigration work at the ACLU of Louisiana, the actual daily population of people detained and the number of detention centers operating in the state was unclear. The incredibly remote locations of most detention facilities in the state, and how often authorities transported people from one detention center to another, only made things harder. I now know it can take at least three hours, and sometimes more than seven, to get to certain facilities depending on traffic and road closures. At this point, I have been to every single detention center in our state multiple times.
To get to this point, it was critical to gain access to all the detention centers operating within our state. To do so, we developed Know Your Rights packets and presentations that we submitted for approval to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). That rigorous approval process ultimately provided us with access to all operating detention centers in the state by 2022. By presenting critical legal information to those detained, we learned that there were thousands of individuals detained in Louisiana without representation, a much higher number than we anticipated. This is not suprising considering Louisiana operates ten ICE detention centers, each of which falls within the jurisdiction of the ICE Field Office in New Orleans. The office also oversees detention centers in Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas, and Tennessee. Louisiana alone is second only to Texas in detaining the highest number of immigrants in the country.
The state is also home to the only detention center attached to an airport in the country: the Alexandria Staging Facility. Tens of thousands of people get deported from, or pass through, the staging facility annually. Many, if not most, are never to be seen or heard from again. When a person arrives at the staging facility, the government has already deemed them deportable, which means there is little recourse to be had. When ICE sends immigrants there, attorneys and family members struggle to obtain the most basic information about how their client or family member ended up there and, most importantly, how they can get out.
Against this bleak backdrop, we became familiar faces to the wardens and correctional officers in charge of these ICE facilities, and with the individuals heading up the New Orleans ICE Field Office. Having access allowed us to be a resource for detained individuals. While it did not ease the sense of injustice immigrants felt in the detention centers, it helped people detained understand their legal options and pathways to release, if any.
As part of the ACLU of Louisiana’s immigration work, we prioritized visiting clients consistently, staying on site all day, and interacting with facility staff. That type of lasting presence brings people together, as long as all parties are respectful of one another’s work. The Field Office and the facilities came to understand that we would be respectful of their constraints if they could accommodate us. As we conducted Know Your Rights presentations in 2022 and 2023 at every detention center across the state, I was the point person on our team liaising with the facility. For that first year, I was there, every time, constantly conferring with detained individuals, facility staff, and with ICE.
Expanding immigration work despite surging cases under the Trump administration
Prior to the elections in 2024, we published our initial report on the Louisiana immigration system: “Inside the Black Hole.” It outlined the conditions we saw at these detention centers firsthand: abusive and discriminatory treatment; lack of access to basic hygiene and food; denial of care for medical emergencies, and more. Once Trump took office again, detention cases surged and conditions only worsened. Armed with years of relationship building and research, we were prepared. Our team was uniquely positioned to quickly get ahead of the surge and free unjustly detained individuals. This included high-profile cases like Mahmoud Khalil, and lesser-known cases like Juan’s. We have recently updated the report with new research explaining what detention looked like in Louisiana under the first year of the current Trump administration.
We hope our work highlights two crucial lessons for other legal practitioners. Firstly, be prepared for detained immigrants to end up in Louisiana. The Alexandria Staging Facility is the spoke in a wheel of mass detentions and deportations. Secondly, investing early in relationships and infrastructure is crucial for immigration providers, especially to gain access to facilities and get the work done from within. When there’s a crisis, it is often too late to build relationships from scratch.
The detention system in Louisiana may still function like a black hole in many ways, with no information coming in or out. But years of patient relationship building, legal advocacy, and documentation have created a blueprint for how we can pull people out of this opaque system. We are working to take that knowledge to others, through our Justice Lab: Immigration project, a volunteer corps that mobilizes attorneys barred nationwide to provide free legal habeas representation to detained immigrants in Louisiana. Our initiative partners overworked immigration attorneys with trained federal litigators to provide crucial habeas support. To answer the call of thousands in need of legal assistance at this critical point in our nation’s history, we aim to build a bench of at least 50 federally-barred litigators to work on cases in Louisiana, representing individuals from across the country detained within the state.
Our work is far from over, but these strategies can be replicated and expanded to protect more people from disappearing into detention. And while our own work is limited to Louisiana, residents across the country can contact their elected officials and urge them to end DHS abuses and hold ICE accountable. Learn more about our Justice Lab: Immigration project, spread the word, and if you are a fit, consider volunteering. Attorneys interested in volunteering can contact the ACLU of Louisiana.
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