The Trump administration is planning on opening a new facility for migrant families and unaccompanied children next to an airport hub in Alexandria, Louisiana, a strategy intended to speed up deportations.
Unaccompanied children would be moved from foster homes and shelters across the U.S. to the Alexandria facility before they are deported. According to the Associated Press, Immigration and Customs Enforcement called the facility a “staging area” rather than a detention center and said inmates would only stay there a few days at most.
Katie Blankenship, an immigration lawyer and former legal deputy at the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida, said she does not believe in the need for more detention centers. Existing detention centers, she said, are inhumane and unlawfully detaining people.
“We’re fighting for all existing ICE detention centers to be closed,” Blankenship said. “We certainly don’t think any more should be opening up, especially not for mothers and children.”
She said the Trump administration sets up detention centers in Republican-dominated states where it doesn’t expect much pushback or disagreement. This, she said, has led to mass incarceration for people across the country, separating families and causing generational trauma.
Children in the U.S. without relatives are sent to foster care. Being sent to an ICE facility instead, Blankenship said, is “incredibly cruel.”
“Children would be placed in inhospitable conditions in these centers and treated poorly, separated from their parents,” she said. “This would be extremely traumatizing for any child.”
Blankenship said she has received countless reports of detention centers unequipped to provide detainees with dignified conditions. She has seen a denial of blankets and pillows, filthy water, reports of ice-cold food, improper clothing, freezing and boiling indoor temperatures and power cuts, as well as detainees experiencing physical and psychological abuse.
Because of this, she said she doubts another ICE facility will be able to provide children with adequate living resources and instead would cause lasting harm and trauma on detainees.
She doesn’t believe detainees would be at the Alexandria detention center for a short period of time as ICE has stated, she said, because she has seen ICE detention centers unlawfully holding people for months at a time.
“I have little reason to believe it to be a genuinely temporary facility for transitions, and it’s using taxpayer money to build inhumane detention centers that line the pockets of corrupt politicians and private prison companies,” Blankenship said.
The current administration, she said, has already shown a disregard for the well-being and human rights of adult immigrants. She said the proposed Alexandria center demonstrates a disregard for the safety of immigrant children who have no control over their immigrant status, being minors.
“Undocumented immigrant children are one of the most vulnerable demographics on earth,” she said. “This would put immigrant children and mothers in extremely vulnerable situations.”
ICE did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Rafael Ramírez Solórzano, a UF Latin American Studies professor who researches Latino social movements, politics and immigration history, said he was not surprised by the new proposed ICE facility.
As an immigration policy historian, Solórzano said, he has seen detention centers spring up across the nation, from mega warehouses to partnerships with police departments and private businesses, all with the intention of making money.
The trend didn’t start with the Trump administration, he said; he’s observed it for the past 20 years after the Department of Homeland Security was established in 2002.
“What we’ve been seeing in the last 20-plus years is that we see evidence of inadequate care of detainees, of their healthcare,” Solórzano said. “We have seen failure of transparency, failure of public accountability of deaths.”
He’s concerned about ICE detention centers, he said, because there’s no real accountability or oversight of the centers.
“What we’re really seeing is family members, children being put not only into detentions but being in cages,” he said.
Even if ICE calls it a holding center, he said, it is still a detention center he suspects will demonstrate the same evidence of inadequate care of detainees.
“That is what’s concerning in regards to our human rights being respected within these detention centers,” Solórzano said.
The facility’s effects will start with deportations, he said, separating families from their children. Because of the fast-paced process of the staging center, he said the right to seek legal counsel will likely be violated while in detention.
Solórzano said the decision to establish the center in Louisiana was strategic. Many states in the South with historically conservative-leaning politics, like Louisiana, Texas, Georgia and Florida — some of the states with the highest numbers of detentions and deportations — don’t have protections for migrants like northern states do, he said. Florida, for example, has policies uniting local law enforcement and federal ICE enforcement.
The trend of problematic treatment toward people of color dates back to slavery in America and Jim Crow laws in the South, he said.
Wrangling children and holding them in these centers is “nothing new,” he added — people are just starting to become aware of them and their cruelty in the last few years.
“We’re just seeing history be repeated again,” he said.
When attorney Nadine Brown first heard about the Louisiana center, she said it was concerning and disturbing to see it framed as a staging area.
A staging area implies detainees’ removal is imminent, so they would not have time to present their cases for relief. She suspects the administration anticipates it will be able to hit its quotas for mass deportation without giving people an opportunity to present their cases, she said.
“I don’t know how they’re anticipating the process is supposed to work, or they’re just going to start detaining people … expediting their hearings or denying them any kind of relief without properly adjudicating each applicant,” Brown said.
In a broad sense, she said, the process isn’t legal, but every case is different, and not all immigrants are eligible to apply for relief.
“We also know that this administration is doing things based on their own perspective of how the law should work,” she said.
She said the administration has consistently tested the legal boundaries of equal protection under the law, not treating immigrants equally to U.S. citizens. For the proposed Alexandria center, Brown expects unaccompanied children who have already gone through a traumatizing journey to America may be treated as even less.
“It’s problematic that now you are re-traumatizing children and putting them in a facility where they don’t have adequate supervision or adequate services available to handle … basic hygiene to mental health,” Brown said.
Contact Angelique Rodriguez at arodriguez@alligator.org. Follow her on X @angeliquesrod.
Angelique Rodriguez is a journalism freshman and the Summer 2026 El Caiman Editor. She has spent two semesters at The Alligator as a University Reporter and El Caiman Reporter before becoming an editor. When she's not working, you can find Angie reading, hanging out with friends, or rewatching her rotation of favorite shows.
