Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. It was 4 p.m. at the Central Louisiana ICE Processing Center, shift change. Employees streamed out, some in blue uniforms and others in scrubs, with clear plastic backpacks and shoulder bags bearing the logo of the private-prison company that operates the facility. The warden made his exit for the day. Inside was Mahmoud Khalil, America’s highest-profile political prisoner. Outside was Sue, waiting in the parking lot. She had been here before. The facility sits notched into a thicket of pine trees, what locals call “the loggin’ woods.” It is 3 miles outside the town of Jena, Louisiana, population 4,000, which is 145 miles (two hours and 45 minutes) from Baton Rouge and 215 miles (four hours and 10 minutes) from New Orleans by car, a punishing commute done regularly by the few immigration lawyers who represent people there, though many detainees don’t have lawyers at all. On the drive, it is immediately obvious why the Trump administration has been shipping college students it has deemed seditious here: It is in the most remote part of a most remote parish in the dead center of the state, nearly equidistant from anywhere that might be called an urban center. It is, by design, difficult to reach. Sue, a recent retiree who lives about an hour from Jena, had been inside to see Khalil before. She had a connection to people working on his case—a friend of a friend—and since she was relatively nearby, she had tried to be helpful. Today she had something special: nine photos she had just printed to show Khalil, the first photos of his newborn son. Khalil’s wife had given birth just days prior in New York. In the days leading up to the baby’s delivery, Khalil’s lawyers had petitioned Immigration and Customs Enforcement for a two-week furlough from his detention to allow him to be present at his wife’s side for the birth. His lawyers said he was “open to any combination of conditions,” including “GPS ankle monitor and/or scheduled check-ins.” ICE considered the petition for all of 30 minutes before rejecting it. But Sue had nine prints of the baby, run off at a nearby Walmart. It would be the first time Khalil would see his newborn son. She went toward the entrance. Even in Jena, a town just big enough to sustain three stoplights, the last vestiges of a timber industry, and a mostly spent oil field, there is little outward evidence of the ICE detention center, where more than 1,000 men sit behind bars on any given day. There is no indication of where you must turn onto state Highway 127, headed north out of town, and no indication of the turn onto Pinehill Road, where there are nevertheless two signs announcing the town of Jena as “Home of the Mighty Giants,” a reference to the high school’s mascot. (The town’s alternative slogan is “Jena: A Nice Place to Call Home.”) If you drive far enough down Pinehill, the trees that flank both sides of the road eventually give way to a clearing, two parking lots, a heap of concertina wire, and two small signs: one for the LaSalle ICE Processing Center, aside the logo of the Department of Homeland Security, and one for Central Louisiana ICE Processing Center, beneath the logo of GEO Group, the private prison operator that runs the facility. CLIPC is one of nine immigrant detention centers in Louisiana, which is not a border state and does not feature a large population of undocumented immigrants. Louisiana is, nevertheless, the second-largest detention state in the country. Nearly 7,000 immigrants are locked up in any one of its nine facilities on any given day. Of that constellation of lockups, CLIPC is notable for a few reasons. It is one of just two Louisiana facilities with its own immigration court on-site, where immigration judges deny more than 3 in 4 asylum claims. Its daily average population of 1,025 detainees makes it the second-largest of the nine centers in the state. It also houses multiple of the foreign college students that the Trump administration has targeted for detention, including University of Alabama engineering doctoral candidate Alireza Doroudi and, most notably, Columbia University’s Khalil. According to the Washington Post, Tufts student Rumeysa Ozturk also went through Jena. At CLIPC, Sue had already passed the unoccupied security shed and flagpoles out front flying the American flag, the DHS logo, the state flag of Louisiana, and the GEO Group trademark. She hit the buzzer at the first high chain-link fence, which was garlanded with a spool of razor wire atop. The gate unlocked; she opened it and shuffled in. She proceeded to a second tall fence with razor-wire garland and a second buzzer. At the facility’s front desk, Sue gave Khalil’s name and detainee number. Employees at the desk took Sue’s wallet, her keys, and a paperback book she was carrying. Sue set off the metal detector, which made her subject to a handheld security wand. But she retained the photos. Then she sat. Visiting hours are lengthy, but actually getting in is no certainty: Visits can be denied for any reason at all. Eventually, an employee came in and gave Sue the all clear. She was buzzed through one locked chamber after another. She was directed down another hall, another locked door, before she finally arrived at a stall with a corded phone. There, finally, on the other side of the plexiglass, sat Khalil, swimming in a large blue smock. He picked up the receiver, and he and Sue greeted each other. By that point, it was nearing two months that Khalil had been at the Jena facility, a time that had been equal parts grueling and boring. Visibility into the facility is extremely limited, but its conditions are notorious. In 2016 three immigrants died in detention within the first six months of the year; a year later, CLIPC was among the top five immigration jails nationally for sexual assault complaints. In 2019 government-oversight agency inspectors at CLIPC found expired and nonlabeled food in the kitchen. In 2023 a 42-year-old Nicaraguan asylum seeker, detained at CLIPC for an additional seven months after ICE had recommended his release, died after being found unresponsive at the facility. Things had improved slightly of late: A congressional delegation had recently traveled to the facility. So, too, had a group of committee staffers. In advance of that national attention, said multiple people familiar with the operation, the facility had brought in a cleaning crew, replaced numerous windows, and repainted. The center even staged a “sanitation contest” among inmates; whoever did the best job of cleaning was to be rewarded with a pizza party. (“GEO strongly disagrees with the allegations that have been made regarding the services we provide,” a company spokesperson said in a statement. “These allegations are part of a long-standing, politically motivated, and radical campaign to abolish ICE and end federal immigration detention by attacking the federal government’s immigration facility contractors.”) Even so, life in the processing center remained punishing. Detainees are grouped by security risk and dressed in color-coded garb, with red uniforms for those deemed dangerous. The 1,000-plus inmates, all male, were housed in dormitory rooms with 70 people per room, sleeping on 35 double-decker bunk beds. The lights are kept on 24 hours a day, making it difficult to sleep. That’s made worse because inmates, despite having thin mattresses and blankets, are not given pillows. The dorms are kept very cold, a stark contrast to the hot and humid central Louisiana climate. Inmates are afforded three or four hours of outdoor time a day, which they often pass by playing soccer. But the contrast between the 90-plus-degree Louisiana heat outside and the frigid indoor temperatures often leaves inmates reeling. Illness is widespread. One lawyer told me that she had spoken with numerous detainees who expressed the wish to be returned to jail rather than continue in immigration detention, which is often worse when it comes to services for prisoners, due to its limited law library, near-nonexistent recreational amenities, and minimal commissary. Visits from friends and family, in these remote enclaves, are rare. Potential visitors are themselves often undocumented or out-of-status and are afraid that if they come to visit their loved ones, they too will be arrested and detained. Of course, that was not the case for Khalil, who had frequent meetings with lawyers, the congressional visit, and other guests. For that, he had been nicknamed El Famoso by his fellow detainees. When Sue reached Khalil, she pulled the photos out and spread them on the counter in front of her. One by one, she placed them against the glass. Khalil’s tired eyes creased at the corners, and a smile spread slowly across his face. She pressed one photo to the window, then another. As she peeled one away and put forward the next, she cooed about the baby: so beautiful, so healthy. Khalil nodded, not moving much from his chair, his lips still closed, his grin wilting and then renewing itself. It was clear the weeks had worn on Khalil. The food at CLIPC is infamous. In photos taken of Khalil on Columbia’s campus just last year, he looked healthy. It was obvious to Sue he had lost significant weight—15 or 20 pounds, easily. Some detainees make short stays in detention. If you don’t fight deportation, they will be rid of you quickly. Those who do fight it often get stuck. Some in the Jena facility have been there as long as 16 months; one woman in nearby Basile was stuck in detention over six years, long after being granted asylum, twice. The majority of inmates at CLIPC are Latino, and many have been arrested elsewhere in the South. But there are Russians, Indians, and Africans now, and more. As the Trump administration had begun to go after student protesters like Khalil and other graduate school enrollees, almost all of them have landed in Louisiana detention, in part, advocates say, because its remoteness ensures that there is almost no access to legal support and the area’s conservative courts make for the easiest deportation conditions. An airstrip in nearby Alexandria makes it quick and straightforward to get people, even those wrongly detained, on a plane to Honduras or El Salvador or elsewhere. Russian scientist Kseniia Petrova, arrested in Boston, is detained at Richwood Correctional, in Monroe. Ozturk, the Tufts Ph.D. student, also arrested in Massachusetts, is detained in an all-women’s facility in Basile, where there are reports of up to 40 pregnant women currently in detention. The immigration court system is opaque. And even if ICE rules that you can leave, there is no guarantee of getting out. Indeed, there is a reason Louisiana’s immigration detention infrastructure, known to immigration experts as “Detention Center Alley,” is often referred to as “the black hole.” It is a place to disappear. Back at the window, Sue stacked the photos of Khalil’s son side by side in the window frame. On one of the prints, she had added a caption beneath the resting baby, eyes closed in a hat and jumper: “My dad is a hero.” Khalil’s smile returned, haltingly. It seemed as though he were working hard to keep his cheeks drawn all the way up. The emotion of the moment was overwhelming, but Khalil remained stoic. “Now, who does he look like?” Sue asked him, and he mustered a quiet laugh. The phone cut off shortly after that. The hour was up. Sue made her way back to the entry. She approached a GEO employee at the desk and told her she had some photos that she was hoping one of the staff members could hand to Khalil. They denied her request. “Oh, come on,” she implored. No, they told her: She had to send them in the mail.