Louisiana Residents Are Resisting Plans to Build ICE Jail on Contaminated Site

The Alexandria International Airport, which is part of England Airpark in central Louisiana, is currently known as the busiest ICE Air Operations hub for deportations in the United States. Immigration and Custom Enforcement’s Alexandria Staging Facility, a terminus for people being removed from the U.S., is reviled the world over by abused and deported refugees from Cameroon to Haiti. Even as the town’s tourism office works in overdrive to entice visitors to the area’s natural and cultural attractions — the scenic Red River, lush butterfly gardens, and historic homes such as the one where venerated Harlem Renaissance poet Arna Bontemps lived from birth to three years old — violence against immigrants keeps coming.

Last year, Alexandria was mentioned in a lawsuit regarding a child with Stage 4 kidney cancer who was deported along with two siblings in April 2025. Now, the same polarizing federal agency that has killed people on the streets and in its custody is planning to expand its operations in Alexandria. ICE has grabbed another chunk of the England Airpark, which is situated on a former U.S. Air Force base that shuttered in 1992 due to groundwater contaminated with catastrophic levels of PFAS, a class of persistent “forever chemicals” linked to cancer, reproductive harms, and other serious health problems.

If ICE has its way, as soon as the end of September, it aims to place immigrant women (including those who are pregnant), infants, and children, on top of this toxic site in a 528-bed facility, to be housed in a former military barracks. To further sully the atmosphere, ICE has contracted with the LaSalle Family Foundation, an affiliate of the private prison operator LaSalle Corrections, which runs the Irwin Detention Center in Georgia. A congressional investigation found ample evidence of rampant medical abuse at the facility, including medically unnecessary gynecological procedures performed on migrant women.

Louisiana residents are mobilizing in opposition to the immigration jail with the help of CENLA Activism, a grassroots group of concerned residents that mobilizes activists in central Louisiana and organizes mutual aid for communities under siege by ICE.

At the center of this scheme is England Economic and Industrial Development District (EEIDD), an independent political subdivision of the State of Louisiana charged with taking over and redeveloping the England Air Force Base after it was decommissioned.

EEIDD, the governing authority for England Airpark, has a board of commissioners who are all appointed by the mayors of Alexandria and Pineville, the Central Louisiana Regional Chamber of Commerce, and Rapides Parish officials. The 10 commissioners, all men, were persuaded last February to rubber-stamp the contract for the ICE jail. Their executive director Ralph Hennessy told Verite News that “the facilities are set up like a traditional dorm room,” and said to ABC affiliate WBRZ that it would bring an economic benefit to the Airpark.

As Hennessy put it: “There are a lot of people in Central Louisiana that make a living off of the immigration world, the prison world.” ICE will pay EEIDD, the district he works for, $530,000 annually. In May, Hennessy’s own base salary rose from $209,615 to $240,000.

Since learning of EEIDD’s plan to allow ICE to detain children in their community, mothers, grandmothers, Christian clergywomen, and educators organizing with CENLA Activism have showed up to EEIDD board meetings, and they have no intention of letting up. They’ve channeled their fury into demonstrations to raise public awareness in heavily trafficked parts of town on the National Day of Action: ICE Out Visibility Event, and have held prayer services that have often brought participants to tears. Pastor Leah Rachal said at an August 25 service she helped organize: “We might disagree on some of the other minutiae of immigration policy. But not this. Nobody wants children to be detained.”

At an August 27 EEIDD board of commissioners meeting, where more than 100 Louisianans packed the overflow room, Rose Marie Norton greeted board chair Oday Lavergne as “the heart of Alexandria” and reminded him, “The protests aren’t necessarily against you; they’re against the system.”

Other community members addressed board members as “brothers,” and cautioned them to think carefully about who will be blamed for any tragic mishap. In every possible way — through prayer, song, even curses — the participants suggested that the board may be taking moral or legal liability by attaching themselves to ICE’s towering pile of collateral damage.

“This will come back to haunt you,” Colleen Buras from Baton Rouge said to the board. “The administration has gone rogue. There’s a lot of policy that is being condemned in the courts. It takes a long time for these things to be adjudicated. Ultimately, you guys will be responsible for what happens in your detention centers.”

Bentley Hensel, a local accountability journalist, explained in his piece for The Kingfish Project how the murkiness of many of the terms and unusual conditions in the “cooperative endeavor agreement” for the jail seemed structured to disadvantage EEIDD’s board over LaSalle or ICE. For instance, Hensel noted, EEIDD has a right to inspect the premises, but not to audit LaSalle’s operating books. Hensel, who grew up in the area and has recently returned, said that in addition to the “unauditability” red flag, there has been an opaque process in which crucial documents were not shared as the board of commissioners went headlong toward an almost unanimous approval.

Marty Floyd, a veteran, retired biologist, and longtime resident of Rapides Parish, told Truthout he fears Alexandria will be permanently stained by what ICE is doing in the town he’s lived in since the 1990s, and he considers it “un-American.”

“I swore an oath to protect the public from foreign and domestic problems. And to me, this is going against that oath. I’ve got to stand up and say something.”

ACLU Louisiana’s communication specialist Jesse Vad drove from New Orleans to attend the August 27 meeting in Alexandria because the board was considering an anticipatory 19-page ordinance curtailing protest at the England Airpark. It unanimously passed, over an avalanche of community objection. Vad said the move to stifle the right to assembly appeared to many of the attendees as if the board were preemptively acknowledging that there will be atrocities that merit mass protest. A number of commenters scoffed at the ordinance and said that if children are harmed, nothing will stop them from assembling freely to demand accountability wherever and whenever necessary.

Vad told Truthout he doesn’t think the board has been given all the facts about the reality of Louisiana’s detention centers.

“I don’t think there’s a single facility in this state that isn’t just absolutely atrocious, unlawful conditions. You know, horrendous incidents at every single one … the board of commissioners and ICE have tried to dress this up as something different,” Vad said. “Nobody believes that. There’s just no reason to believe that.”

Daniel Nakamura drives two hours from the small city of Ruston whenever CENLA Activism puts the word out. But he came specifically to the August 27 meeting because of his family’s experience during World War II. His parents, Yosh and Grace Nakamura — both born in the U.S., both American citizens — were nevertheless rounded up with other 120,000 Japanese Americans and interned in concentration camps when they were in their late teens.

“My dad’s family was at Gila River in Arizona and my mother’s in Manzanar in California,” he said.

Writing in Years of Infamy: The Untold Story of America’s Concentration Camps, author Michi Nishiura Weglyn, describes the harrowing reality at Manzanar: “A WRA investigation conducted in the summer of 1942 had revealed: The guards have been instructed to shoot anyone who attempts to leave the Center without a permit, and who refuses to halt when ordered to do so. The guards are armed with guns that are effective at range of up to 500 yards.” Later that same year, sentries shot and wounded 10 people and killed two — Henry Ito, a 17-year-old from Los Angeles and James Kanegawa, 21 from Tacoma.

“They had a kind of trick question: Do you renounce your loyalty to them? It seems like there’s a lot of trickery with the way immigration’s practiced right now,” Nakamura said.

Nakamura says he’s buoyed by the idea that odious places such as Alligator Alcatraz were closed by a lot of scrutiny. “But you know,” he said, “a lot of pain happened up to that point, and knowing that it might happen to women and children, this is unacceptable.”

A Chance to Walk Back the Deal

Mich González, an attorney at the Southern Poverty Law Center in New Orleans, assists immigrants who are voluntarily deporting themselves to keep their families safe and intact. He was invited to Alexandria by the locally led movement to help them share expert information about the reality of the new ICE jail and how bad it would be for the town’s image and, as some said, its soul.

González, who was escorted out of the previous board meeting while delivering passionate testimony, told Truthout he’s already conveyed to the commissioners that the deal they made with ICE is by no means a “done deal” unless they want it to be. “I already let them know at the July meeting, attorneys can help get them out of the contracts,” he said.

After his second look at the board in action, González responded with sympathy: “These guys are in over their heads, and I think some of them know it in their guts.”

He said about the commissioners, “It would be a mistake for them to think there is any serious oversight over ICE from the U.S. Office of Inspector General or the U.S. Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties. They no longer do that. ICE is its own overseer. The commissioners must know this already; it’s old news that there is no oversight.”

González told Truthout that if the commissioners were his clients, he would advise them to unwind these contracts on the basis that they did not have sufficient information and understanding to vote for them on behalf of the town. Later they won’t be able to say they didn’t know.

“At the end of the day, you know what it is. You know it’s an arm of a private prison company. You know it’s an intergovernmental service agreement. You know that it’s an ICE detention center.”

Erin Tracy, who moved back home to Alexandria permanently in 2024, and founded CENLA Activism with her mother in advance of the first No Kings Rally in June 2025, is also noticing a change due to activism.

“We are seeing some of these board members start … to ask more questions,” Tracy told Truthout. “Because something they have not been doing is asking the right questions. They just see the money and think it’s going to help people, but it’s not. It’s just negative attention on our town, and we don’t want that. We have to live here. This is not the economy we want. This is not what we want to profit off of.”

She said that ICE abuses in Alexandria are not limited to the holding station at the Airpark.

“I have a friend whose entire family essentially has been taken and deported to Mexico,” she said. “We have a big community where there’s a bunch of plant nurseries that are staffed by Latinos, and they are very much in danger. One of our local Hispanic markets has had to close. I know of another one where the owner’s husband is now in ICE detention.”

It’s seemingly made no difference to ICE when immigrants have documents or when they have no criminal record. “There’s no discretion,” she said.

“Organizations that are responsible for a lot of death and violence are coming in and saying ‘We’re gonna hold children here and don’t worry we’re gonna protect them,’” she said. “Why would I ever believe that?”

In fact, she thinks that’s backwards.

“It’s we who have to protect our neighbors,” Tracy said.

Tracy was happily surprised that at the August 27 meeting it was announced that a special meeting would be held on September 8 to give everyone an opportunity to speak about the proposed staging area — something they had not previously allowed. But as the days passed, she became concerned that though a majority of the board members signed a letter in favor of the special meeting, one week later it had not been publicly announced.

Sheri Scallan, England Airpark’s Communications Manager wrote in an email to Truthout that she had no details about the time or venue for the special meeting. Two days letter a press release announced the meeting’s cancelation with no explanation. Scallan did not respond to a follow-up email asking for comment in response to activists’ concerns.

Now, CENLA Activism is sponsoring a community-led community forum of its own to call for an end to child detention.

“Our work will not end until this detention center project is shut down for good,” Tracy said.