Detained for 23 hours per day in a dirty prison cell. Held without access to medical care or necessary prescription medications. Locked up, far from home, with limited ability to communicate with lawyers or family members. These are the stories shared by men currently detained at Camp J, a unit that was closed in 2018 due to safety and security concerns, in the notorious Louisiana State Penitentiary (commonly known as Angola).

These men are not being held because of a conviction history. They are being detained under a new partnership between Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry and the Trump administration to use the prison wing for immigration detention—a visceral illustration of this administration’s vitriol for and criminalization of immigrants. Last month, the administration launched “Operation Catahoula Crunch” with the goal of arresting 5,000 people in the greater New Orleans area, a move that mirrors the use of indiscriminate enforcement raids in Charlotte, North Carolina; Chicago, Illinois; and Los Angeles, California.

A brutal history

Angola’s name comes from the plantation that previously occupied the land on which the prison now sits. Enslaved Africans were forced to labor on this land, and after emancipation, Louisiana quickly replaced slavery with convict leasing and prison labor, ensuring that Black labor could still be extracted through the criminal legal system. Today, it remains the largest maximum-security prison in the United States, housing more than 5,000 people—nearly all of them Black men and many of whom labor in the prison’s fields under harsh conditions that echo its plantation past. Human rights observers, journalists, and federal courts have long condemned Angola for its brutality, rampant medical neglect, and reliance on forced labor, yet the prison remains a central pillar of Louisiana’s punishment infrastructure.

This is not incidental. Louisiana has maintained one of the highest incarceration rates in the United States for decades, with a criminal legal system that has been geared toward controlling, confining, and exploiting Black communities. Angola stands as the most visible embodiment of that design: a modern-day plantation sustained by policies that criminalize poverty, racialize punishment, and normalize extreme confinement as governance.

Yet even within Angola’s long, grim history, Camp J stands out. Constructed in the 1970s as a disciplinary unit, Camp J was used almost exclusively for extended solitary confinement. People incarcerated there were condemned to spend their sentences in small, sweltering cells with no air conditioning and minimal human contact. The unit became notorious among incarcerated people and staff alike as a “prison within a prison,” plagued with reports of extreme isolation, physical abuse, suicide attempts, and severe mental health deterioration among those held there.

By the mid-2010s, pressure to close Camp J had reached a breaking point. Advocates, including the Vera Institute of Justice’s Louisiana office, the ACLU of Louisiana, and Solitary Watch, among others, exposed the inhumane conditions that violated basic standards of safety and dignity. In 2017, following a series of staff resignations, security failures, and growing public scrutiny, Louisiana’s Department of Public Safety and Corrections (DOC) acknowledged that Camp J was not sustainable. And, in May 2018, the Louisiana DOC finally announced its closure.

Incarceration as coercion

Angola’s legacy has always been one of exploitation and punishment, not rehabilitation. For decades, the prison has stood as a symbol of the racial and economic injustices at the heart of America’s mass incarceration system—a modern-day plantation where forced labor, solitary confinement, and state-sanctioned cruelty are normalized under the guise of justice.

Now, this same place, a prison built on the land where enslaved people once toiled, has become a new frontier for immigration detention. This summer, Governor Landry used an emergency declaration to reopen the unit, purportedly because Angola did not have enough bed capacity to house all the people his administration anticipated would be convicted of violent crimes under his new “tough-on-crime” policies in a maximum-security setting. In an extraordinary bait and switch, the state then immediately partnered with the Trump administration to hastily reopen the unit to hold up to 400 people per day for federal immigration enforcement.

This move makes explicit what has long been true—mass incarceration and mass deportation are twin systems of racial control. Both rely on the criminalization of Black and Latine communities, both operate through detention and isolation, and both extract political and economic value from human confinement. Just as Angola has been used to keep Louisiana “tough on crime” and politically invested in imprisonment, immigration detention now serves as a new revenue stream and enforcement mechanism—one that keeps the state invested in punishment rather than progress.

Fueled by a massive $45 billion allocation from the reconciliation package passed by Congress in July 2025, United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is using all available avenues to expand its capacity to detain immigrants, including by using state prisons and state land in Florida and Indiana, federal prisons, and military bases. Angola is the most recent and visceral example of the administration’s calculated cruelty—subjecting people to harsh and punitive conditions to coerce them to “self-deport” or else.

Louisiana did not become one of the nation’s leading incarcerators by accident. It became so by continually reinventing systems of confinement to maintain racial and economic hierarchy. Reopening Camp J for immigration detention is the latest chapter in that story and one that threatens to expand Louisiana’s most violent carceral practices to a new population, under the banner of immigration enforcement.

Expanding the net

ICE’s enforcement and detention tactics amount to an indiscriminate dragnet, treating all immigrants with cruelty and threatening their rights, safety, and freedom—whether they are green card or Temporary Protected Status holders, vetted refugees, international students, asylum seekers, long-time undocumented residents, or even U.S. citizens. The agency justifies their arrests and detentions using false claims of immigrant criminality while targeting people for their speech and political views, for their labor and where they find it, for the majority-Democratic cities they live in, and for their accents and race. Despite Trump’s racist dog whistles, research has demonstrated that there is no connection between migration and crime.

People in ICE custody who have been convicted of a crime have already served their sentences before being transferred to ICE. Some advocates argue that, by placing them in immigration detention, the government is violating the Fifth Amendment’s “Double Jeopardy” clause—in effect, punishing people twice for the same crime.

Furthermore, immigration detention cannot legally be used to punish people who are alleged to have immigration violations. Instead, the government has historically justified its widespread use as necessary to ensure that people appear at their immigration hearings—despite evidence showing that detention is not necessary to do so. Under international law and norms, immigration detention should also not be used to deter others from migrating in the future, nor has it been shown to be an effective way to do so.

While immigration detention has always functioned essentially as punishment, the use of state prisons, like Angola, further demonstrates a brazen disregard for these legal principles.

A new front for mass incarceration

People in immigration detention face unique challenges that other incarcerated people typically do not. This is because, while immigration detention may appear similar to incarceration in prisons, the two are legally distinct: immigrants are detained in a federal “civil” detention system, in which they lack the protections and safeguards afforded to people in criminal custody—most notably, the right to an attorney to aid in their defense if they cannot afford one. Without this guarantee, many immigrants—many of whom are living below the poverty line and may not have fluency in everyday English, let alone in the U.S. legal system—are left to defend themselves in immigration court.

These due process violations are particularly acute in Louisiana, which has a high concentration of immigration detention facilities—there were 17 active detention facilities in Louisiana during the first nine months of the second Trump administration—and a scarcity of immigration attorneys to help the people detained within them. In its most recent plans to expand immigration detention, ICE has reportedly targeted Hammond, Louisiana, as the potential site for a large-scale warehouse that would imprison up to 9,000 people. About 64 percent of cases for detained people filed in immigration courts in the state in the past five years were for people unrepresented by counsel. Many others in detention are denied the opportunity to see a judge altogether before being deported through a process called expedited removal.

Nevertheless, the state has sought to expand its capacity to detain immigrants through its partnership with ICE to use Angola for immigration detention. People are transferred to Louisiana detention facilities from all over the country—in fact, it is the second-highest destination state for people to be transferred to from other states. More than one in four people detained by ICE nationally since January were held in Louisiana at some point during their detention. These cross-country transfers severely aggravate the challenges people face in finding or maintaining legal representation, undermining their ability to challenge ICE’s unlawful detention and bond practices and defend their right to remain in the United States.

What’s unfolding now under Governor Landry’s administration is a revitalization of one of the most notorious sites of state violence in the South. It extends Louisiana’s role as a national hub for ICE detention where private prison companies profit from mass incarceration and immigrant detention alike. Louisiana’s other major detention facilities are all operated by private, for-profit prison companies, such as LaSalle Corrections or GEO Group, creating perverse profit incentives that result in horrific conditions and human rights abuses. The ACLU of Louisiana filed public information requests with Louisiana DOC and the governor’s office to disclose the identity of any private entities profiting from Camp J, but the state has so far failed to meet its November 2025 deadline to release the information. Regardless, conditions at the facility are already cause for alarm: immigrants detained in Camp J launched a hunger strike over inhumane conditions including extended solitary confinement, lack of basic hygiene supplies, lack of medical care and necessary prescriptions, and inability to access attorneys.

The use of state prisons for immigration detention is a new front of mass incarceration, fueled by the Trump administration’s position that all immigrants entering the United States should be detained by default and its simultaneous gutting of avenues for release. Angola has always been a site where the state tests the limits of human suffering. Reopening Camp J for immigration detention doesn’t just repeat history—it amplifies it, fusing the worst of the prison system with the injustices of the immigration system. Allowing immigration detention in Camp J signals to the nation that cruelty and punishment remain not an unintended consequence of detention, but its very purpose.