Trump turns notorious Angola prison into ICE detention facility
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem says the administration chose Louisiana’s infamous former slave plantation prison as a scare tactic to push migrants into “self-deporting”
DHS Secretary Kristi Noem announces the detention of immigrants on the grounds of the Louisiana State Penitentiary (Photo via @KristiNoem/X)
ICE is opening a new immigrant detention center within the infamous Louisiana State Penitentiary “Angola”, which became operational on Wednesday. Officials confirmed on September 3 that 51 male immigrant detainees had already been transferred to Angola, with plans to exceed 200 by month’s end. The immigrant detention facility within Angola can hold up to 400. According to the governor, those held there will be kept “completely isolated” from the general prison population, under the control of ICE contractors.
In remarks to the press made on Wednesday, September 3, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem announced that the Trump administration deliberately picked one of Louisiana’s most infamous prisons to cage immigrant detainees as a scare tactic to push undocumented immigrants into “self-deporting.”
“Angola prison is legendary, but that’s a message that these individuals that are gonna be here, that are illegal criminals, need to understand,” Noem told press in front of the infamous Louisiana State Penitentiary, speaking behind a podium bearing the sign “Louisiana Lockup Angola”.
Louisiana State Penitentiary, also known as Angola prison is the nation’s largest maximum-security lockup. It sits on the grounds of the former Angola slave plantation, from which it takes its name.
As Noem described, Angola does indeed have a “legendary” reputation, one which includes human rights abuses and slave-like conditions. In September 2024, prisoners launched a class-action lawsuit over Angola’s brutal forced farm labor. The prison’s mostly Black inmates are still compelled to pick cotton in the same fields once worked by enslaved people – often under sweltering, dangerous heat.
“If you don’t think that they belong in somewhere like this,” said Gov. Jeff Landry of Louisiana at the news conference on Wednesday, referring to the immigrants to be detained at Angola – “you’ve got a problem.”
Prisoners forced to work farm labor at Angola have raised the alarm about their grueling labor conditions. “It is the only job that you are forced to have a gun pointed at you,” Patrick Jones said in a testimony in a federal courtroom back in April of this year. “You are forced to be talked to like you are less than a human being.”
Trump expands mass deportation machine with new ICE prisons and raids
The conversion of Angola prison into an immigration detention site is part of a major goal of the Trump administration: an aggressive expansion of the deportation system through both state-run and privately operated facilities, as Trump seeks to meet mass deportation goals. In 2024, Trump made a central campaign pledge to launch the largest mass deportation operation in US history, vowing to remove an estimated 15 to 20 million people.
In May, the Trump administration set an aggressive new goal for immigration enforcement arrests: Axios reported that during a May 21 meeting, Trump advisor Stephen Miller and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem pressed federal immigration agents to ramp up enforcement, setting a target of 3,000 arrests per day.
Since then, the Trump administration has ramped up militarized ICE raids, igniting mass protest and opposition across the country as immigrant workers are violently ripped from their families and communities.
In addition to suppressing protest, the Trump administration is also scrambling to find a way to detain the influx of immigrant arrestees. Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill,” signed into law on July 4, allocates USD 45 billion for mass detention of immigrants, spurring the administration’s attempts to open new ICE facilities throughout the US. This includes several proposed facilities in Colorado, including a proposal to detain immigrants in a private prison in the state which has drawn grassroots opposition. Immigrant rights, Indigenous, and environmental activists have also united in the movement to oppose Trump’s newly-opened ICE detention center in the Florida Everglades, titled by his administration as “Alligator Alcatraz” in a reference to the potential danger the local wildlife might pose to the safety of immigrant detainees.
