Activists, faith leaders, and other community members packed the England Airpark Authority Board meeting in Alexandria, Louisiana last Thursday, so many that they spilled into two overflow rooms. They urged the board members to cancel a contract for a 528-bed detention camp planned for women and children at nearby abandoned military barracks, a Trump immigration detention camp project billed as “humanitarian.” Or, rather, they urged the board members who did their job and attended the meeting.
Just seven of the 11 had bothered to show up to hear the speakers, some of whom had driven three hours to be there. One board member took a nap during the meeting. Another repeatedly interrupted speakers with a gavel, then failed to give back the time he had spent admonishing them.
When Mich González, civil rights attorney with SouthEast Dignity Not Detention Coalition, spoke slightly over his three-minute allotment, an armed cop hustled him out, shoving people aside as he did so.
Still, González told the Prospect, it seemed like speakers had at least “moved to concern” two board members, the only Black men on the board. That’s hopeful, González said, because unless they pull the contract, he expects the first people to be locked up inside the detention prison will be children and pregnant people already in custody, two groups uniquely vulnerable in Trump’s immigration terror campaign.
As the Prospect reported last week, guards are abusing and neglecting children at the Dilley camp in Texas, both emotionally and physically, according to new legal filings. Pregnant people routinely describe abuse and negligence inside ICE prison, including at Louisiana’s Richwood Correctional Facility. González knows of at least four pregnant women in that facility. He knows of at least three who have miscarried in Louisiana detention.
“Instead of releasing these women,” González, “they’re essentially prolonging their detention until the women relent and beg for their deportation.”
Read: Trump administration routinely violating immigrant children’s rights
Although the government has abandoned plans to repurpose warehouses into immigration prisons, it is still in pursuit of greater physical capacity for immigration detention, including overseas. Recent solicitation requests show that federal officials are seeking facilities with room to hold up to 6,000 people across Colorado, Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Washington state, as well as thousands more in camps in Guatemala and elsewhere around the world.
“The idea that our government was going to convert these industrial warehouses to detention centers was so horrific, and there was such a big response from people … that ICE was forced to retreat,” said Setareh Ghandehari, advocacy director at Detention Watch Network, referring to the sustained outrage from community members, who forced the government to retreat from some of the 11 warehouses it bought at a 134 percent markup to nearly $1 billion.
The first people to be locked up inside the detention prison will be children and pregnant people already in custody, two groups uniquely vulnerable in Trump’s immigration terror campaign.
Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro (D) confirmed the cancellation of two warehouses in his state last week, saying in a press release that the agency had halted plans for detention sites in Upper Bern Township and Tremont, which would have imprisoned 9,000 immigrants. Last month, ICE said it was also getting rid of warehouses in Social Circle and Flowery Branch, Georgia; Romulus, Michigan; Roxbury, New Jersey; and Salt Lake City, Utah, which together would have imprisoned at least 22,500 immigrants.
But advocates and attorneys said that the government is only shifting its tactics, not its overall project, which recent procurement documents bear out.
“It’s a bit of a pivot but their overall goal and their overall vision is the same, which is to have more large-scale massive detention centers that ICE owns themselves,” said Ghandehari.
The government wants to own camps outright because officials believe that will inoculate them from state lawsuits, a claim George C. Zoley, CEO of private prison company Geo Group, made during his May 2026 earnings call. Such lawsuits are “fundamentally unconstitutional,” he said, and state officials should “only have very limited involvement.”
A solicitation published June 8 asked private contractors to provide a detention facility within the northern district of Ohio with up to 1,000 beds.
Another solicitation published July 10 seeks multiple “turn-key” detention facilities throughout the U.S. that would provide a combined 5,000 beds. The buildings would need a minimum capacity of 700 beds near Miami, 1,500 near Denver, another 1,500 near Seattle, and 1,800 near central Pennsylvania.
On July 17, it asked contractors for facilities to provide comprehensive services for “unaccompanied alien children” that could be “scalable to accommodate populations of up to 3,000 children per site.”
At the same time that it expands detention domestically, the federal government is looking for ways to jail people abroad. A solicitation request on July 10, for example, seeks four “Prefabricated Modular Steel Detention Housing Units” for the U.S. Embassy in Guatemala, designed to hold two people each.
The government is looking for much larger overseas facilities, too, as newsletter The Redoubt was the first to report shortly after the government posted its request for detention housing units in Guatemala. The Redoubt found that the Department of Homeland Security wants to build detention facilities abroad that could hold up to 1,000 people each, a move that the Detention Watch Network called an “alarming expansion” of Trump’s mass detention and deportation campaign to include disappearing and exiling people to offshore detention, “often through patchwork agreements with little to no details or oversight, and in defiance of court orders.”
“This will undoubtedly put people’s lives at risk by obscuring transparency, cutting people off from their support networks, denying them due process, and subjecting them to brutal conditions, at times indefinitely,” the group said in a press statement.
The detention camp González and his fellow community members spoke about last week would be in an unused military barracks in Alexandria, Louisiana. It is part of England Airpark, which is owned and operated by the unelected governing group England Airpark Authority Board. That group also owns and operates the Alexandria International Airport and controls thousands of acres of central Louisiana’s public land.
The Trump administration is paying the airpark’s related economic development district $530,000 annually to use its tarmac and land, and is reportedly “kicking in” payments to renovate the barracks. The site is one of America’s most toxic pieces of land, where the level of forever chemicals in drinking water is 575,000 times higher than the federal limit.
The group running the facility, the LaSalle Family Foundation, is the tax-exempt charitable arm of the private prison contractor LaSalle Corrections, which runs multiple detention camps in Louisiana’s Winn Parish, where two detention prisoners have died this year. Among other abuses, LaSalle Corrections routinely exceeds its contracted limit of prisoners inside its detention camps by at least 100 beds and forces women to undergo “unnecessary or overly aggressive” gynecological procedures without consent.
Read: The Prospect’s running count of how many people ICE has killed and injured
According to England Airpark Authority Executive Director Ralph Hennessy, the prison camp could open as early as August, though some activists say that has now been pushed to a later date. In news reports, Hennessy frames the facility as a short-term “humanitarian effort” for sheltering vulnerable people for no more than 72 hours ahead of self-deportation. Those claims are not credible, González told the Prospect. There is no guarantee that someone self-deporting can do so in 72 hours because it is a process they do not control, and not every country is accepting deportees.
A spokesperson for the authority did not respond to a request for comment, including whether board members are concerned that LaSalle Corrections is attempting to evade taxes by using its foundation to run the camp.
González noted that there are no special exceptions for pregnant people transferred between facilities, so if people are hauled out of one site and taken to the new one in Alexandria, guards will shackle them at the ankles, wrists, and waist, which is medically dangerous. The trauma of such events can cause enduring physical harm; González said he worked on getting one pregnant woman released from detention, whose medical neglect within detention was so severe she developed eclampsia, potentially life-threatening seizures, and then endured an extremely difficult birth. (González said both mother and baby are OK now.)
He also noted that going forward with the plan will draw severe public condemnation.
“They’re running out of people to detain and deport,” González said. “They’re already snatched people’s husbands and fathers, now they’re snatching women and children … even though they know that’s a bad look for them.”
