Louisiana Voice

Editor’s Note: There are quite a few words and phrases highlighted and underlined in BOLDFACE, ALL-CAPS GREEN in the following post. For the as yet uninitiated, those are links to other stories that corroborate what I write. Click on those links to read the stories to which I refer.

With profound apologies to Col. Mulberry Sellers in Mark Twain’s 1892 novel The American Claimant, Thar’s gold in them thar jails.

Louisiana already had the highest incarceration rate in the civilized world even before the crackdown on undocumented people by the Mango Mussolini and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

But with Department of Homeland Security (the parent agency of ICE) sweeps and wholesale deportation—sometimes of U.S. citizens—the upsurge is a financial windfall for the state, a couple of dozen sheriffs’ departments and for-profit private prisons.

BAYOU.TRUTHS on Tik Tok pretty much tells the story of Louisiana’s detention centers:

Louisiana is the epicenter of Trump’s massive deportation activity for one simple reason, the podcast says—money.

The raids across the country are “tearing families apart” on the one hand and in Louisiana, on the other hand, “they’re filling budget holes” and quietly building an entire economy around the crackdown. It’s no coincidence that the REMOTE LOUISIANA FACILITIES are hours away from expert legal immigration legal counsel and hundreds of miles from family members.

The state now holds about 10,000 IMMIGRANTS in ICE custody on any given day, MORE THAN ANYWHERE ELSE IN AMERICA, the podcast says. “And here’s the part no one talks about:

“The federal government pays Louisiana jails and sheriff’s offices $70 to $90 per detainee per day, sometimes more.” That equates to payments of $700,000 to $900,000 per day spread across the state. When you do the math, you start to see why the SOUTH and in particular, Louisiana’s rural parishes, are welcoming Trump’s immigration crackdown with open arms.

Some of these jails in places like Richwood, Riverbend, LaSalle, Winn and Jackson Parish, which previously sat half-empty, now are raking in millions of dollars per year in federal detention contracts. In some parishes, ICE money makes up as much as 25 percent of the entire local budget.

Sheriffs capitalize politically by hiring staff (read: political patronage, i.e. padding political influence), purchase equipment and to upgrade facilities. But one of the areas that is often neglected is the GENERAL CONDITION of the detainees. Louisiana’s immigration detention system has been CITED for medical neglect, violence, falsified records, unsafe condition and even deaths. LouisianaVoice HAS WRITTEN ABOUT some of those, including a whistleblower’s complaint about NONCONSENSUAL HYSTERECTOMIES  performed on female detainees at a privately-run ICE facility in Georgia…

The plain and simple fact is that because these prisons are most often run by private operators like LaSalle or GEO or local sheriffs, there is little oversight and even less accountability.

They are, in two words, cash cows. And it’s not improving. Trump’s latest directive is intended to ramp up arrests so that ICE may maximize its detention capacity. As a result, even more parishes and private prisons are GETTING IN LINE for the federal largesse.

“So, while the headlines talk about raids in big cities,” the podcast concludes, “the engine powering this crackdown runs straight through Louisiana’s back roads, rural jails and sheriffs’ offices because every detainee represents another federal dropped into a system Louisiana can’t afford to lose.”

And it’s doubly important to remember that all this is being done to these thousands upon thousands of detainees without the constitutional guarantee of due process (You’ll find that in the Fifth and 14th Amendments).

Gives the last line of the Pledge of Allegiance, “With Liberty and justice for all” hollow ring, doesn’t it?

Now, if they’d change that to “With government by the few and profits for the oligarchy…”