Louisiana Voice

The size of Hammond may be about to swell by some 40 percent.

An otherwise sleepy college town an hour’s drive east of Baton Rouge, the city has apparently been designated as the future location of one of several human warehouses where immigrant detainees will be held in preparation for faster deportation procedures.

Apparently not satisfied with moving detainees around the country to whichever detention center happens to have space to accommodate them, the Trump administration is planning to contract with private prisons to construct the equivalent of express lanes in the form of warehouses capable of housing between 5,000 and 10,000 people each where they would be staged for more expedient deportation.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) plans to share the concept this week with private detention facilities like LaSalle Enterprises in Ruston, CoreCivic (formerly Corrections Corp. of America) of Brentwood, Tennessee and the Geo Group of Boca Raton, Florida, to gauge interest in the plan.

On the face of it, it appears silly to offer conjecture on why a private prison may or may not be interested—of course they’re interested!

If ever there was such a thing as a cash cow, the emergence of private prisons as an economic force would certainly qualify.

Private, for-profit prisons currently house MORE THAN 91,000 PERSONS. That represents 8 percent of the total state and federal population. And the industry is one of the FASTEST-GROWING businesses in America.

And now Hammond is being considered as the possible location of a center to house up to 9,000 individuals (that’s equivalent to another 63 percent of the entire enrollment of Southeastern Louisiana University) as part of an overall plan to warehouse as many as 80,000 human beings.

It’s important to remember that private prisons are run for one purpose and one purpose only: to make a profit. That means—and history has borne this out—that private prisons prioritize cost-cutting over inmate welfare. That fact is supported by several multi-million-dollar lawsuit settlements brought on behalf of a single private prison, Lasalle. See HERE, HERE, HERE and HERE.

Not only do these private prisons earn the most profit by providing the minimum in terms of health care, food and non-existent rehabilitation services, but they will even go to great length to protect those profits whenever a family squabble THREATENS THEIR BOTTOM LINE.

Other than owning a Chic-Fil-A franchise, running a private prison under contract to ICE and Homeland Security is about the MOST LUCRATIVE GIG going these days. Donald Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill, passed and signed into law last July, included a whopping 45 BILLION  (with a B) for ICE to build those new immigration detention centers like the one to be located in Hammond.

Perhaps CoreCivic CEO DAMON HININGER said it best when he said back in August, “Our business is perfectly aligned with the demands of the moment.” He went on to say that private prisons “are in an unprecedented environment with rapid increases in federal detention populations nationwide and a continuing need for solutions.”

To bolster that assertion, CoreCivic reported total revenues of $538.2 million during the second quarter of 2025, up 9.8 percent from the same quarter in 2024.

In seeking a problem to fit a solution, the federal government has aided private prisons and defense contractors in turning deportation into a THRIVING BUSINESS MODEL while families are torn apart and lives disrupted—all over scare tactics that somehow are repeated in this country over and over.

Whether it’s the Irish, the Japanese (remember the internment camps?), Middle Easterners, Somalis, the Latinos, Native Americans or Blacks, we have always managed to find some group to fear and hate. That seems to be locked into our DNA.

And yet, even as we heard tens of thousands of men, women and children (some of whom are actually citizens of this country), we have yet to arrest or detain the first individual who hires them to perform landscaping, who reap our crops, roof our buildings and work in our restaurants.

Just to be sure we fear and reject those who don’t look and talk like us (whoever “us” is supposed to be), the administration has made certain to let us know that those unwanted aliens are soaking up our welfare payments and stealing our jobs and houses.

That, my friends, is a myth. They are not on Medicare or Medicaid. They don’t vote and believe it or not, if their employers are being honest, they also pay taxes. And they’re not eating our dogs and cats.

What they are doing, however, is allowing private prison operators and parish sheriffs to enrich themselves handsomely. Why do you think so many SHERIFFS are scrambling to build newer and bigger jails? It’s because the federal government pays generously to house detainees in local jails.

Why else are these local and state law enforcement agencies so eager to sign agreements with ICE?

• Bossier Parish Sheriff’s Office
• Beauregard Parish Sheriff’s Office
• St. Charles Parish Sheriff’s Office
• Lafourche Parish Seriff’s Office
• Plaquemines Parish Sheriff’s Office
• Ouachita Parish Sheriff’s Office
• Union Parish Sheriff’s Office
• Arnaudville Police Department
• Greenwood Police Department
• Gretna Police Department
• Kenner Police Department
• Pearl River Police Department
• Hammond Police Department
• Morse Police Department
• Baton Rouge Police Department
• Louisiana State Police
• Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections
• Louisiana Alcohol and Tobacco Control
• State Fire Marshal
• Louisiana National Guard
• Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries
• Louisiana Attorney General

If you’ve been paying attention, you may have noticed a recent spurt in the number of private prisons that have SUDDENLY APPEARED on the scene. Do you think that’s a coincidence? It’s a GROWTH INDUSTRY, pure and simple, and for a reason: a GENEROUS UNCLE SAM.

If a building program to house 80,000 people seems large, here’s some context: That number is dwarfed by the more than 580,000 people deported by the administration this year alone. It’s enough to make one wonder what the end game goal is for Homeland Security and ICE. Where does it end? What happens when they run out of Latinos, Africans and Mid-Easterners. How will they justify their continued existence (because we know that once created, an agency is rarely abolished).

Who will be targeted in the next wave of deportations? That is a question that must be asked. After all, nearly half of the 68,000 people being held at the beginning of this month had no criminal record at all. That’s more than our President can say about himself.