NEW ORLEANS – The ACLU of Louisiana has come out against the increasing number of immigrants held in ICE detention centers across the state.
“Louisiana is fast becoming the epicenter of the Trump administration’s dangerous mass deportation and detention agenda,” ACLU of Louisiana executive director Alanah Odoms Hebert said. “Louisiana taxpayers should not be subsidizing the forcible separation of children from their families or the mass detention of immigrants in brutal and dehumanizing conditions. State and local officials have a responsibility to stand up to these abuses and refuse to cooperate with the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant agenda.”
Recent raids in several locations across Mississippi highlight the spike in the number of incarcerated immigrants, and the number of detention facilities in Louisiana has jumped from just two in 2018 to 11 as of last month, according to the ACLU.
In May, the ACLU of Louisiana and the Southern Poverty Law Center sued the Trump administration on behalf of a dozen immigrants who had been held after they “sought asylum at official U.S. points of entry in compliance with federal law and then were confined and sent to remote prisons in Louisiana and Alabama,” according to the ACLU.