After former Columbia University student and permanent U.S. resident Mahmoud Khalil was detained by federal immigration officials over his involvement in student-led protests last year — a move that shocked advocates for free speech and immigrants’ rights around the country — he was taken to Jena, a small town of 4,000 in north-central Louisiana and home to one of the country’s largest and most notorious immigration detention centers.
Since last week, Khalil — a Syrian-born Palestinian and permanent U.S. resident— has been locked up in the Central Louisiana ICE Processing Center, a privately-run immigration lockup with an average daily detainee population of nearly 1,200.
Though the center’s surroundings appear peaceful and idyllic — tucked into a tall pine forest on the edge of town — it has a troubled past that includes allegations of abuse and sexual assault, excessive use of force, overuse of solitary confinement, medical mistreatment or neglect and unfit living conditions.
Earlier this month, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested Khalil in the lobby of his Columbia University apartment building, took him to New Jersey and quickly transferred him to Jena, more than 1,000 miles away from his pregnant wife, who is a U.S. citizen, and his attorneys in New York.
Civil rights lawyers who work with immigrants locked up in Louisiana’s detention centers say they are concerned for Khalil, given the Jena facility’s unsettling history. However, they say they are not surprised that ICE transferred Khalil to Louisiana, where access to counsel is extremely limited, and where the courts skew conservative.
In a phone interview with Verite News last week, Anthony Enriquez, vice president of U.S. advocacy and litigation at civil rights nonprofit RFK Human Rights, said the Trump Administration is “forum shopping” Khalil’s deportation case — looking for the jurisdiction that will give the government the outcome it wants.
“The government has the ability to do that with immigration,” Enriquez said. “It can arrest someone in a jurisdiction where the case law is very favorable to the person arrested, and then sweep them away to another jurisdiction.”
Khalil’s attorneys are eager to get the case, and Khalil, out of Louisiana. On Monday (March 17), his attorneys asked a federal judge to transfer the case. On Wednesday, the judge obliged, ordering the case transferred to New Jersey. The New York Times reported that the order would not have an immediate effect on where he is being detained. A federal judge in New Jersey will have to make a decision on whether to transfer him out of Louisiana.
Khalil’s legal team did not respond to requests for comment.
Representatives from the Department of Justice, ICE and the Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to requests from Verite News for comment on Khalil’s case or on immigration detention centers in Louisiana.
‘The black hole’
Nora Ahmed, legal director of the ACLU of Louisiana, said she has visited Khalil in Jena since he was transferred there — a four hour drive from her office in New Orleans.
She stressed the challenge that Louisiana’s “handful” of immigration attorneys who represent immigrants in detention face getting to their clients in remote areas.
The Central Louisiana ICE Processing Center, where Khalil is detained, is more than 100 miles from Baton Rouge, the closest major city.
“[Louisiana is] the place where you can cut off from outside eyes,” Enriquez said. “That’s the place where you can ensure that they won’t have access to lawyers or to advocates.”
Court filings reveal Khalil’s wife, Noor Abdalla, who cannot fly to Louisiana as she is in the last stage of pregnancy, is concerned about her husband’s well-being in Jena. She said her husband, who is Muslim and fasting for Ramadan, is finding it hard to sustain himself on the food provided to him after he breaks his fast at the end of each day. According to Abdalla, Khalil did not receive his daily medication for an ulcer until two days after he arrived in Jena.
“I also worry about Mahmoud braving this period of detention,” Abdalla said in a sworn statement of support. “I cannot overstate how distressing this entire experience has been. … This experience has flipped our lives upside down.”
The Jena facility, operated by private prison corporation GEO Group – ICE’s single largest private contractor – has been plagued with allegations of abuse and mistreatment since the late 1990s when it opened as a juvenile correctional center. In 2000, the federal government closed the facility, operated when GEO Group went by a different name, Wackenhut Corrections Corporation, for “excessive abuse and neglect,” including the use of chemical weapons on children.
Last year, the ACLU of Louisiana and RFK Human Rights co-produced a report on the Louisiana immigration detention system called “Inside the Black Hole” that featured information gathered from interviews with more than 6,000 detainees over roughly two years. Prominent features of the report include prison-like settings, inadequate mental health and medical care, allegations of human rights abuses, and extremely limited access to language interpretation services and to attorneys.
Immigrants detained at the Jena facility reported rodent droppings on the facility’s kitchen surfaces, human excrement in a shower area and allegations of prolonged isolation leading to medical and mental health distress.
In one example, detainees in Jena told interviewers they had to clean sewage in their cells without protective gear after toilets and drains overflowed in an isolation unit.
“The smell was unbearable. It burned my eyes and made it almost impossible to breathe,” the report quoted one man saying. “The sewage sat there for hours until we were given towels to clean it ourselves. They didn’t even give us gloves.”
In 2023, Verite News reported on a Nicaraguan man who filed at least 29 grievances against different aspects of his conditions of confinement before he died after suffering a heart attack inside the facility. And last year Verite News reported on federal oversight bodies findings that staff at the Jena detention center violated the civil rights of a Columbian man with epilepsy, by repeatedly assigning him to an upper bunk, threatening his well-being.
The GEO Group did not respond to a request for comment.
