On a normal day, Dale Ross said she sees about 20 or so people appear before a judge at the New Orleans Immigration Court on the fifth floor of One Canal Place Office Tower at the end of Canal Street. Now, volunteer court watchers like her are seeing numbers "closer to the hundreds."
On the morning of June 1, more than 200 people were scheduled for immigration hearings at the court — a docket that swelled past 250 by the following day.
Most were scheduled for master calendar hearings, often used to set future court appearances as someone begins to make their case for remaining in the United States. Advocates, court watchers and immigration lawyers say many were there, traveling and waiting for hours, simply to confirm their current mailing address.
"Some people came from other states. One guy came from Georgia, one guy came from New Jersey," Ross said. "And all they were doing was checking their addresses and then letting them go."
If they're too late or don't appear, it's an automatic order for deportation. One court watcher said a mother stepped out of the courtroom briefly to take her child to the restroom and was nearly marked absent when her name was called.
These "mega dockets," advocates say, may be setting the stage for another surge in deportations — one that targets people actively participating in the U.S. immigration system's legal process, with arrests that may occur in quiet neighborhoods rather than the highly visual apprehensions that occurred in places like Minneapolis and Chicago.
The Trump administration's latest tactic to increase deportations comes as Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrest data obtained by the Deportation Data Project under the Freedom of Information Act and reviewed by the Gulf States Newsroom shows that the New Orleans ICE office's area of responsibility (AOR) — which encompasses Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas and Tennessee — has the second-highest arrest rate in the country relative to its noncitizen immigrant population.
What the data says
Working with the Center for Collaborative Investigative Journalism, the Gulf States Newsroom analyzed ICE arrest data from the start of the Trump administration in January 2025 to early August 2026, relating arrest totals to U.S. Census Bureau data on the immigrant population.
Focusing on noncitizen immigrants — the group the Trump administration has stated it aims to target — the New Orleans AOR arrest rate is exceeded only by the San Antonio office in Texas. In total, there were more than 45,000 arrests in the region, or about 670 for every 10,000 noncitizen immigrants.
Information on the site of each arrest reveals important differences among the three Gulf South states — particularly in the extent to which local law enforcement plays a role in putting people into ICE’s custody.
Weighed against the size of each state's noncitizen immigrant population, Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama have similar arrest rates for people who seem to have been arrested in the community at large — likely on the street and in their homes or places of work.
But Alabama and Mississippi hand people from local law enforcement custody to ICE at around three to four times the rate, respectively, as Louisiana does. Most of these transfers are from county jails.
Law enforcement cooperation in Mississippi
In Mississippi, the state's more than 4,800 arrests stand out less for their volume than for where they were made. Unlike Louisiana, where ICE arrests are generally concentrated in the state's largest metros, Mississippi's enforcement footprint is more diffuse — and more dependent on partnerships with county sheriff’s departments.
"[Mississippi's local law enforcement] have cooperated with ICE to a certain extent and what they've done in the past, though, is they've exercised an amount of discretion," said Jeremy Litton, a Jackson-area immigration attorney.
Many of those apprehensions were along the Gulf Coast, although DeSoto County, near Memphis, and Rankin County, where ICE has an Enforcement and Removal Operations field office, also made up some of the areas with the most overall apprehensions in the state.
In Litton's view, that discretion on how to handle immigration issues locally is largely being eliminated from the top down. A new law went into effect in Mississippi on July 1, making it a criminal offense to be in the state without status.
Another newly passed law also mandates increased cooperation with federal immigration authorities, requiring all state government agencies — including local governments and higher education institutions — to “cooperate to the fullest extent possible with the federal government and other state and local governments in enforcing lawful federal immigration laws.”
It also prohibits any Mississippi departments or agencies from adopting policies that inhibit federal immigration enforcement, making local decisions unenforceable under state law.
Immigrants face extreme challenges, advocates say, with the legal system in the Gulf South.
A traffic stop, a minor infraction, an expired registration — any contact with local law enforcement that ends in an arrest can feed someone into the deportation pipeline.
Gracie Willis, a rapid response attorney with the National Immigration Project, described the effect this creates in practice.
"We don't have to have a surge of ICE officers in the way that we saw during 'Catahoula Crunch,'" she said, referring to the federal immigration enforcement crackdown that launched at the end of 2025 in east-central Louisiana and parts of the Mississippi Gulf Coast. "It means that local day-to-day law enforcement officers can pull someone over and essentially begin an immigration enforcement action."
Rachel Taber with immigrants’ rights group Unión Migrante echoed what Willis said and described knowing two Louisiana families personally whose fathers were arrested by local police on minor traffic infractions and turned over to ICE, including one who died attempting to cross the border and reconnect with his family.
"It's not hyperbole to say a traffic stop is a death sentence," she said.
Taber also said she's getting calls from people in her organizing network in Mississippi and Alabama who need rides to immigration court in New Orleans.
Local transfers in Alabama
Alabama’s numbers are harder to compare directly to Louisiana and Mississippi because a larger share of its total includes arrests logged to federal law enforcement rather than state or local agencies.
Setting aside those federal transfers and looking only at Alabama's in-state total, county jails and other local law-enforcement hand-offs still account for a substantial share of the state's arrests, with community arrests making up the balance. On a population-adjusted basis, Alabama's local-transfer rate lands well above Louisiana's, and closer to Mississippi’s.
But Alabama's arrests are distributed across an even wider array of sites than Mississippi, with enforcement visible from the Tennessee Valley to the Gulf Coast.
The jails in Jefferson County, Lee County, Madison County and Morgan County each log triple-digit arrests. Baldwin County, on the Gulf Coast, sees arrests attributed to Foley, Gulf Shores, Robertsdale, Fairhope and Orange Beach police departments — beach and tourist corridor municipalities that have, in effect, become enforcement nodes.
That local infrastructure has continued to expand. The Alabama Department of Corrections signed onto ICE's 287(g) program in August. Police departments in Atmore, Clio, Coaling, Owens Cross Roads, Springville and Wetumpka signed on under the "task force" model, which lets officers exercise limited immigration authority during routine police work.
Immigration advocates have raised similar concerns about the current iteration, warning it encourages racial profiling of Latino residents and creates a financial incentive to make immigration arrests. Participating agencies can receive $7,500 per trained officer, reimbursement for salary and benefits and quarterly payments tied to the number of ICE arrests made.
The ‘right way’
Advocates say people following the immigration process — doing it the “right way” as Litton put it — are being arrested and deported, too.
In 2025, Litton had a client who had applied for asylum and had attended half a dozen check-ins over a year. But the Department of Homeland Security hadn't filed his case with the court beforehand.
"They detained him at his check-in, and then it devolved from there," Litton said, with that client's case ending in deportation back to India.
Litton described people like his client as "low-hanging fruit" when it comes to easily targeting individuals for deportation.
"It's a lot easier, and it's safer for you to arrest people that are coming in to do their check-in," said Litton. "People that are going to their court dates, people that are going to get their fingerprints."
But he said that comes at a cost to everyone — citizens and noncitizens alike.
"Do you really want to be deporting the people that are telling you where they live, that are telling you they haven't committed any sort of crimes," Litton said. "Versus, do you want to go out there and investigate who's murdered someone or go into a house and try to find somebody that you have an active criminal warrant for?"
The whole system, in Litton's view, is being reworked to start with a particular end in mind — deportation.
"We just want everybody to do this the right way, and then they completely cut off the right way," said Litton.
So the means — like master calendars or “mega dockets” — are not necessarily unusual.
"It's not that they have these hearings; it's what happens at these hearings," said Litton. "Instead, it's about how the tools of the immigration system are being used against people seeking status."
'A region built for this'
Willis has tracked the New Orleans AOR for years, and says she believes the Gulf South's high enforcement numbers reflect something deeper than geography or demographics.
"Louisiana bought in hard on immigration detention," she said.
When state jails became available around 2018, Louisiana quickly converted them into immigration detention facilities — putting the state second in the country in detention capacity.
Gov. Jeff Landry, she noted, has made that commitment explicit, including housing detainees at Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola and naming a wing there after himself.
But Willis said the New Orleans field office's willingness to test aggressive tactics — and export them — may be the most significant factor. She pointed to the April 2024 detention of two Honduran mothers and their U.S. citizen children at an Alexandria hotel, held incommunicado for days without access to counsel.
"We had never seen that before," she said. "But the New Orleans field office did it without any shame, without any embarrassment. And then we started seeing it in other places."
That pattern — test it here, then scale it nationally — may be the most important thing the data reveals about why the numbers look the way they do in the South.
Litton characterized the region less as experimental for immigration enforcement and more as having favorable conditions from the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals to engage in more unconventional tactics.
But for court-watcher Dale Ross, handing out information about resources to people outside the courtroom at One Canal Place, the data is less about patterns than people.
"The people are being ripped from their families. They're being ripped out of a life that they have established," she said. "And you have to always focus on the fact that the people who are here, they have been allowed to establish lives. They have been allowed to go to work. That's the part that's desperate."
This story was produced by the Gulf States Newsroom, a collaboration between Mississippi Public Broadcasting, WBHM in Alabama, WWNO and WRKF in Louisiana and NPR, and the Center for Collaborative Investigative Journalism (CCIJ). It is part of an ongoing joint investigation between CCIJ and New Lines.
