Up to 200 Marines are scheduled to deploy to Louisiana to assist Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) at its facilities in the state.
According to a Department of Defense spokesperson, troops will “perform administrative case management duties, provide logistical support (vehicle maintenance, fueling, etc), and execute clerical functions associated with the in/out processing of illegal aliens at detention facilities, such as inputting biographical and detention data.”
They will not be conducting law enforcement operations, the spokesperson noted, and are “specifically prohibited from direct contact with individuals in ICE custody or involvement in any aspect of the custody chain,” according to a July 3 press release.
In that press release, the U.S. Northern Command announced the deployment of a “first wave” of approximately 200 Marines from their base in North Carolina to Florida, with more troops to be deployed as part of the same mission to Louisiana and Texas.
It is unclear when troops will arrive in Louisiana or which ICE facilities they will be deployed to in the state.
The deployment comes in response to a request for support from the Department of Homeland Security, which triggered the mobilization of up to 700 Active, National Guard, and Reserve component forces, approved by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth in May.
Louisiana houses more immigrant detainees than any other state in the nation except Texas.
Nationally, ICE continues to break records for the number of people held in custody at one time. As of June 23, the end date of the agency’s latest facility report, 57,861 detainees were held across the United States and Territories, a new record that surpassed the one set in the previous statistical release, which reported 56,397 people in custody.
In April, nearly half of the contracted facilities at the time were over their contracted capacity, meaning they housed more people than specified in existing ICE contracts, according to data obtained through records requests and analyzed by the Transactional Records Access (TRAC) Clearinghouse at Syracuse University.
According to that data, the Pine Prairie ICE Processing Center, located 65 miles north of Lafayette, was at nearly twice its contracted capacity, with a max population of 923 at a facility contracted for 500 detainees. According to the for-profit prison operator GEO Group, which runs the facility, the center has a total capacity of 1094.
The Pine Prairie facility has been the subject of numerous complaints over human rights abuses, along with unsafe and unsanitary conditions.
In 2020, DHS issued a memo to the operators that listed deficiencies and recommended corrective action. The document posted for public review on the department’s website was heavily redacted, but included recommendations on food safety and proper protocols for sexual assault investigations. The document was recently deleted from the department’s website.
Following years of complaints and legal action by human rights groups, Pine Prairie was set to close and its average daily population dropped to 318 in January of last year. Since then it has more than doubled again.
Given its growing detainee census, ICE is in no position to close facilities at the moment. Instead, the agency has continued to add new detention facilities to its list, most of them local jails and detention centers, creating a roster of over 201 facilities across the country per the agency’s latest release.
This does not include the much-publicized Everglades Detention Center, coined “Alligator Alcatraz” by the Trump administration, in Florida. ICE began moving detainees into that soft-sided facility — a large tent filled with bunk beds in cages — last week.
A vast majority of immigrant detainees, 71.7%, have no criminal convictions, according to agency data obtained and analyzed by TRAC.