Louisiana Voice

Jasmine Mooney received no special treatment when she was DETAINED IN SAN DIEGO in “inhumane conditions,” which should raise serious questions about the treatment of Columbia University graduate student Mahmoud Khalil in a Louisiana detention center.

If a high-profile individual like Canadian actress Mooney can be subjected to a revocation of her work visa and the ensuing barbaric conditions of a federal detention center, how do you think an Algerian citizen with a funny name like Mahmoud Khalil is being treated in a Louisiana detention center?

And which detention center is it? A New Orleans TV station posted a photo of the sign of the Lasalle Detention Facility in JENA in LaSalle Parish but there also facilities in Pollock and Oakdale  – in GRANT and ALLEN parishes, respectively.

The LaSalle facility operated as Jena Juvenile Correction Facility form 1998 to 2001, when a federal investigation found it unfit for use and ordered it closed. Mostly white guards, the investigation report said, used “cruel and humiliating punishments” and “excessive force” on the mostly black juveniles incarcerated there.

It reopened in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 when 450 inmates from the Jefferson Parish Prison were transferred there. There, Inmates claimed that officers beat, kicked, and hit them while they were shackled. Officers ordered inmates to kneel for hours at a time and hit them if they fell. Inmates were forced to hold their faces against walls which had been covered in chemical spray. When they became ill and vomited, inmates claimed officers wiped their faces and hair in the vomit.

Now known officially as Central Louisiana ICE Processing Center, known as CLIPC, it has served as a detention center for those accused of breaking immigration laws.

In 2016, the Southern Poverty Law Center found that Detention Center, detainees at CLIPC had some of the lowest rates of representation in the country. In 2015, only six percent of detainees at CLIPC were represented by counsel, compared to 37 percent nationally, and only five percent of all asylum applications were approved, compared to the national rate of 48 percent. CLIPC, according to a 2017 report, also was among the tip five facilities in the number of complaints of sexual assault.

On March 25, 2020, 79 female detainees who had been attending a presentation by the GEO prison group on COVID-19 protocols were pepper sprayed and in the first half of 2016, three detainees died in custody at the facility. One died from heart ailments, one of liver failure after admission for possible sepsis and a third who was denied medical care died from cancer only months after being released.

All of which give Mooney’s claims of “inhumane conditions” claim a ring of validity and raise serious questions about the treatment of Khalil, detained on questionable charges that more closely resemble a violation of his First Amendment rights than terrorist activity for his participation in pro-Palestinian protest at Columbia University. Whether or not you agree with Khalil is beside the point. If you are a true American who adheres to the principals of the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights, you must agree with Voltaire who uttered, “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it,” the quote that is the very basis of the First Amendment.

There should be no room for the Trump administration’s Justice Department to argue that point.