This story was originally published by Verite News
Immigrants who have recently been held at the Pine Prairie ICE Processing Center say that conditions at the facility, a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement lockup in rural Evangeline Parish, have deteriorated as more and more people have been held there over the past year.
In interviews, a man detained at Pine Prairie through June and a legal consultant for another man held there this summer described a crowded facility with scarce resources — men sleeping on floors due to an alleged lack of beds inside packed dormitories; detainees wearing the same uniforms for several days because they weren’t given a change of clothing (not even underwear), pleading with staff for hygiene products to keep themselves clean and denied access to medical care and other services.
“These kinds of conditions are deadly and they’re not tenable and they’re not fit for human life,” said Alexandra Smolyar, an attorney at Georgia-based nonprofit Asian Americans Advancing Justice who consulted with the man detained at Pine Prairie over the Summer.
Pine Prairie, which is run by the private prison corporation the GEO Group, has a contract with ICE that calls for a maximum daily population of 500. But it has been operating well above its contractual capacity of 500 detainees since as early as mid-April, according to information from data research organization Transactional Records Access Clearing House (TRAC) at Syracuse University, or TRAC. While ICE reported that Pine Prairie had an average daily population of 788 on September 15, the most recent date for which a count is available, TRAC researchers have calculated the average population at that time at 915 people.
Since President Trump was sworn in for his second term — promising an unprecedented crackdown on undocumented immigrants, no matter whether they have criminal records or are considered dangerous — the number of people being held in immigration detention has skyrocketed by 69%, from just over 39,000 in December to about 66,000 today.
Complaints from immigrant rights advocates about poor conditions inside detention centers are not uncommon. In 2020 and 2021, federal oversight bodies received several complaints from advocates about lack of hygiene products and personal protective equipment inside Louisiana’s immigration detention facilities, including Pine Prairie, during the COVID-19 pandemic.
As that detained population has grown in 2025, media reports and advocates have described cramped quarters where living conditions have gone from bad under the Biden Administration, to much worse under Trump.
Advocates told Verite News that Pine Prairie is a case in point. They said capacity issues are leading to worsening conditions at the facility, which already had a long history of complaints alleging human rights abuses and civil rights violations.
“This year it feels much worse,” said Tania Wolf, an advocacy manager at the National Immigration Project, who has gone on frequent visits to ICE detention centers in Louisiana. “It feels like things are getting to a point where things are gonna boil over in terms of conditions.”
A ‘horrible pressure point’
Lenin, a Honduran citizen who was detained at Pine Prairie from October 2024 until he was deported in June, said in an interview last week that conditions at the facility were poor during the entirety of his stay. Lenin, who said he fled his birth country in 2015 after MS-13 gang members allegedly killed a close relative and threatened to kill him, asked Verite News to publish only his middle name because he fears for his safety since he has returned to Honduras.
Lenin said when he first arrived at Pine Prairie he was placed in a crowded dorm where some men slept on the floor. He said that he and other detainees had been given only one pair of underwear and one uniform, leaving them with no way of changing into clean clothes for days. They had difficulty getting hygiene items, including soap, shampoo, toothpaste and at times even toilet paper, Lenin said. The dorm was kept cold and staff would not respond to detainees’ requests to increase the temperature, he alleged, adding that staff often denied him visits to the medical unit to receive medication or treatment for anxiety and depression.
“They don’t treat us like humans,” Lenin said. “If you don’t speak English, you can’t have anything,”
In late July and in early August, attorney Alexandra Smolyar, at the Georgia-based nonprofit Asian Americans Advancing Justice, sent emails to immigrant rights lawyers who work in Louisiana, including Wolf, alleging “absolutely abysmal” conditions inside Pine Prairie, relayed to her by a detainee with whom she had consulted.
The details laid out in her emails are similar to the conditions that Lenin described — inadequate clothing leading to detainees wearing the same clothes for days on end, guards shouting and using profanity when speaking to detainees, staff skipping nightly pill calls causing people to miss medications, detainees getting the wrong medication.
“Overcrowding is growing more dire by the day; medical care is severely lacking; there’s no access to a law library or mail,” she wrote in an August email. “The conditions are really harrowing.”
In a September interview, Smolyar said the Pine Prairie detainee she was in contact with, who has since been deported, described to her a packed intake area for people initially booked into the facility with one shower, one toilet and one sink and detainees sleeping on bare mattresses set on the floor of a holding cell. (Smolyar declined to identify the former Pine Prairie detainee she was in contact with, but she said he was deported in August.)
“It epitomized how the expansion of detention is coming to this horrible, horrible pressure point where people’s lives are in jeopardy every day,” Smolyar said.
Wolf said she had already become concerned about overcrowding at Pine Prairie in July, when she attended a standard tour of the detention center.
Wolf said she and others on the tour — which was approved by ICE officials — repeatedly asked staff and accompanying ICE agents for a count of detainees booked into the facility that day. In her notes, Wolf wrote that the group was never given a population count. The omission, she said, was very unusual.
When the tour got to the visitation area — a space where detainees often meet with attorneys — Wolf said it looked more run down than in previous visits she’d made to Pine Prairie.
“It just looked a little bit more — for lack of a better term — lived in,” Wolf said.
Wolf said detainees later told her that some of them had been sleeping in the visitation unit due to overcrowding. In a phone interview this week, Wolf said she’d never heard of a facility making detainees sleep in its visitation area before then.
In a statement, a spokesperson for the GEO Group, the company that operates Pine Prairie, denied claims of worsening living conditions at the facility.
“GEO strongly rejects these baseless claims, which are preposterous and bizarre,” wrote GEO Group Director of Corporate Relations Christopher Ferreira. “The Pine Prairie ICE Processing Center provides high quality support services that adhere to ICE’s detention standards and contract requirements, which provide for ample access to pre-scheduled recreation opportunities both indoors and outdoors. Individuals at the Center are in no way deprived of natural light nor are they subjected to excessive artificial light.”
In an emailed statement, ICE spokesperson Tamara Spicer, did not answer specific questions about conditions at Pine Prairie but said the agency is experiencing “unprecedented operational demands” due to “recent unlawful border crossings.”
“ICE has appropriately intensified enforcement operations to restore integrity to the system,” Spicer said. “The volume of apprehensions is not the result of ICE policy but the direct result of individuals choosing to break the law. ICE will not apologize for enforcing U.S. law.”
Problems with ICE’s average daily population figures
ICE provides bimonthly reports with “snapshots” of the total number of detainees in its custody in each state and overall. But, for individual facilities, the agency only reports the average daily population — pooling numbers from the start of the fiscal year (October 1) through the present day. The result is a skewed perception of how many people are detained at a facility at any given time.
In April, ICE reported that Pine Prairie detained an average of 689 people — though ICE records show the population reached as high as 923 on April 13, a number obtained by TRAC through a Freedom of Information Act request.
Data researchers have responded to the lack of consistent data on daily population counts by creating a new method to calculate the average daily populations that they say provides more accurate results for how many people are currently (or have recently been) detained at a facility. To find the “interval average daily populations,” as they call it, researchers compare the two most recently reported average daily populations and then compare that number to the total days between when those two average daily population numbers were reported.
Researchers publish the most recent interval average daily population figures for individual ICE detention centers on deportationreports.com, a directory with information about ICE facilities. According to the site, on Sept. 2, Pine Prairie’s interval daily population was 1,010 detainees, more than double its contractual capacity and 233 people and more than ICE’s reported average population for the same day of 783 people.
Overcrowding in ICE facilities began making headlines in March, when images and video from inside Krome detention center in Miami showed detainees sleeping on floors with cardboard boxes for makeshift mattresses.
According to data obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests and analyzed by researchers at TRAC, nearly half of all ICE facilities in the country were housing more detainees than their contracts with ICE allowed as early as April.
That data showed two other Louisiana facilities, Richwood Correctional Center and Winn Correctional Center, run by private prison company LaSalle Corrections, were operating over their contractual capacities by several dozen detainees.
LaSalle Corrections did not respond to emailed requests for comment on its facilities’ operating over capacity.
Backed up
Wolf said that on the tour at Pine Prairie, staff referred to the detention center as an “overflow” facility for ICE’s staging facility in Alexandria that sits on the tarmac of an international airport that is the Department of Homeland Security’s main deportation hub. Considered the final stop for many migrants before they are removed from the U.S., the staging facility is supposed to hold detainees for 72-hours or less, while ICE prepares for their deportation flights. However, in September, the Guardian reported that many detainees are being held at Alexandria for longer than three days.
“For the system to work … the people who are going to be funneled into the staging facility need to be somewhere else in the weeks preceding,” said Norah Ahmed, legal director at ACLU of Louisiana.
According to Ahmed, Pine Prairie appears to be operating as a pre-staging facility — holding detainees with orders of deportation who may have exhausted their options for legal ways to remain in the country while their deportation flights are being prepared. She said when flights don’t take off as planned, due to unforeseen circumstances, such as negotiation breakdowns between the U.S. and countries accepting deportees, sometimes people get returned to Pine Prairie after it has already accepted new residents to take their place, contributing to overcrowding.
Lenin spent roughly nine months at Pine Prairie. As the facility was growing more crowded, Lenin said, he was in solitary confinement. He said staff told him it was for his own safety after a confrontation with other detainees. He said he told staff members that isolation, inside a small room with no windows to the outside world and where the hallway lights were kept on continuously, might exacerbate his anxiety and depression. But he remained in segregation, he said until his deportation in June.
Smolyar, who works mainly with people detained in Georgia, said she fears that, in the months since the detainee she was consulting with at Pine Prairie was deported, things have gotten worse.
“We’re seeing incredibly high numbers of people being detained. They’re being pushed to a breaking point,” Smolyar said. “These kinds of conditions are deadly and they’re not tenable and they’re not fit for human life.”
