To increase immigration detention capacity, the Trump administration selected several sites in Louisiana for expansion. In September 2025, the Department of Homeland Security announced a new partnership with the state government to retrofit a formerly condemned dormitory that was colloquially called "the dungeon" for its inhumane and solitary confinement conditions into an immigration detention center at Louisiana State Penitentiary, commonly known as “Angola.” A former slave labor camp, Angola has long stood for the most deadly forms of incarceration, recently referred to as “Hell on Earth.” The detention center at Angola, formally known as Louisiana ICE Processing Center but colloquially referred to as “Louisiana Lockup” or “Camp 57,” houses approximately 180 individuals daily, with capacity to more than double that number. Reports from the facility immediately highlighted substandard care, with a total lack of medical support, failure to provide adequate hygiene or medications, and a lack of potable water. Multiple individuals in the facility went on hunger strike to protest these conditions.

Louisiana is also where the ICE facility with a sexual harassment and forced labor program for transmasculine people and masculine queer women took place, by the way.

& the Angola camp was also discussed in this ACLU report on prison slavery in the US, because of the brutal slave labor (including literally picking cotton while armed guards on horseback watch you, in 100+ F / 40+ C degree heat, without water or bathrooms).

Four detainees at the largest Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center in the U.S. filed a federal lawsuit on Saturday alleging human rights abuses, "horrific" conditions and "severe medical neglect" at the facility. The complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas, details "inhumane" treatment inside Camp East Montana on the U.S. Army's Fort Bliss military base in El Paso, Texas. The suit describes a litany of abuse allegations, including a lack of medical care and physical violence at the hands of guards, and accuses the government of human rights and constitutional violations. "Detained people are regularly subjected to severe beatings or sexual harassment by guards; squalid living conditions; spoiled and inadequate food; no meaningful programming or recreation; inadequate access to basic hygiene products such as soap, razors or nail clippers, outbreaks of disease; and limited or no access to sunlight," according to the complaint. According to the complaint, the center's guards beat Gerald Akari Angye, one of the named plaintiffs, so severely he had to be hospitalized and placed in a wheelchair. Angye, who has been at Camp East Montana for just over a month, claims he was then locked in solitary confinement for 15 days. "No human being should ever have to go through this," Angye said in a statement released by the American Civil Liberties Union, one of the organizations representing the detainees. "I have already experienced torture in my home country of Cameroon and I never thought I would experience such severely violent treatment by guards here in the United States of America." Another detainee identified in the complaint only as Navdeep, a former mail handler with no criminal history, says he experienced dirty toilet water flowing into his sleeping area, difficulty accessing cups for drinking water and breathing problems because of excessive dust from the desert. Navdeep wore the same clothes, including underwear, for three weeks, according to the lawsuit. "We could die here, and it feels like no one here would care," Navdeep said in the ACLU statement.

& from March 30 2026: