Most Louisianans are familiar with the term ”Cancer Alley,” referring to that stretch of land between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, where petrochemical facilities have contributed to high rates of cancer. Now, state residents are learning a new term, “detention alley,” as rural parts of the state are turning into hubs of immigration enforcement with skyrocketing numbers of people in custody.
Molly Hennessy-Fiske is a reporter for the Washington Post, who recently spent time in “detention alley,” specifically the town of Winnfield. She joined Louisiana Considered to discuss the emotional impacts and economic boosts the rural community is experiencing.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
BOB PAVLOVICH: Your reporting begins in the small town of Winnfield, the birthplace of Huey Long. What can you tell us about this community up until Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) came to town?
MOLLY HENNESSY-FISKE: So this is a part of Louisiana I was not as familiar with. I've lived in Houston for about 14 years and I come over to Louisiana quite frequently, including western Louisiana. But I hadn't been to this part, which is a logging area. Timber is the longtime industry. There were sawmills there. People were growing trees on their land and harvesting them. So that has been the main driver of the local economy. Most of the major highways bypass the area, so they relied on timber to really keep things going until private prison companies and the detention center came to town.
PAVLOVICH: Is that how ICE ended up there?
HENNESSY-FISKE: Yeah. So what happened was, first there was a private prison company CCA, which came and they built a prison which was operated by them and the parish, in coordination with the parish, the sheriff's office. And so the original facility was a state and locally operated prison. But then ICE basically offered them a better deal–Immigrations and Customs Enforcement–to have a detention center that would pay people better, have better benefits, and also compensate the sheriff's office. Give them a bigger cut of how much they were paid, depending on the number of prisoners they had, but guaranteed them like a minimum number of prisoners would be housed there.
PAVLOVICH: So they've turned a prison into a migrant detention center then. Ever since the reelection of Donald Trump and the crackdown on immigration, what has the town looked like? How dramatically has the population changed?
HENNESSY-FISKE: Well, in some ways, it hasn't changed at all, in terms of what happens at the detention center. The detention center is technically in town, but it's not in the center of town. It's out on the outskirts, surrounded by a forest, the Kisatchie National Forest.
So it's not something that people see every day. They see the workers around town in their uniforms sometimes, but the number of people that are detained there, the type of immigrants who are detained there, these are not things that people generally see or are told, although there's a lot of curiosity about that.
The economy and the population have declined. In recent years, timber has declined a lot as an industry just because they need fewer workers. There's a lot of automation and a lot of competition from overseas. So they rely more in a lot of ways on the detention center to keep the economy going.
PAVLOVICH: Is this some of the economic benefits that they're experiencing there? Could you explain that to us?
HENNESSY-FISKE: Definitely, I mean, when I talked to local leaders, especially the sheriff, that's what they talked about. They talked about the good paying jobs that the detention center provided, but also the cut of the money that the sheriff's office gets and what they devote that to. To wellness checks on the elderly, to litter cleanups, to expanding their own parish jail, adding staffing, adding investigators, narcotics investigators, because as we all know, there's like an opioid epidemic in America and other drug issues in Winnfield and other communities. And generally that's what I heard from people was they saw that as, the benefit.
PAVLOVICH: According to your story, many Winnfield Parish residents were initially opposed to the ICE detention facility when it started back in 2019. What were their arguments then and in the time since? How have their minds changed?
HENNESSY-FISKE: Well, it's important to remember that this is a pretty red area where a majority of people voted for President Trump, support immigration restrictions. And so the opposition was mainly connected to concern that immigrant detainees would be criminals, dangerous people who might escape or who would be getting released into the local community.
And there were some other conservatives who were opposed to it because they didn't want money to be spent on detention. Detention and prisons are expensive in terms of how much it costs governments. And so if you're a fiscal conservative, generally here in Texas as well, where I live, a lot of people oppose that, even if they support immigration restrictions. And I spoke to some people in Winnfield who said, yeah, that was their initial thought. They just wanted people deported without very much detention.
And then even some conservatives today were critical of the facility in terms of they want more transparency. They wanna know what countries are the immigrants who are detained there coming from. Are they facing criminal charges or just immigration violations, which technically are not criminal because Immigration Court is an administrative court, not a criminal court, right? So, they said they felt like ICE and the local government hadn't been transparent enough about that.
PAVLOVICH: You spoke to locals about the changes that they've been experiencing in the town. What were some of the people's reactions to it, who supported the facility and the economic boosts as opposed to those who didn't?
HENNESSY-FISKE: I did overwhelmingly hear from people who supported it and I, I feel like I did a good sampling of going around and talking to people just around town, random people, but also community leaders, people who were active in the community, people who had lived there a long time. Trump supporters, people who were not Trump supporters. And most of them felt like it wasn't just the economic benefits. They also supported President Trump and the Trump administration's immigration restrictions, and they saw the facility as an extension of that.
I did also start hearing from people that there were some locals who had been deported, and so I immediately thought, well, I wonder what their relatives think of this facility, what they learned about it through their loved one being detained and deported. And there was one waitress in particular who a couple people had mentioned, they said, “Well, I support Trump's immigration restrictions, but I feel bad for this woman whose husband got deported, but I still support them.”
And so I went and found her and talked to her and I even talked to her husband on FaceTime
from Mexico, where he was deported back to. They met working at a local Mexican restaurant, where she still works and that his family runs. And she actually had voted for President Trump and she wasn't blaming him for what happened, really. And that surprised me.
PAVLOVICH: How is she making sense of all this?
HENNESSY-FISKE: Well, her main frustration was you know, she was sharing her story with people 'cause they would ask, well, a lot of them said, “well, you know, you, you all should have gotten his status adjusted. You, he should have, you know, become legal before this happened.” And she said they had tried to do that, but that it would've taken years, he would've had to go back to Mexico. They have kids, they're trying to make a living, they have rental properties they're trying to maintain. So that just wasn't doable for them. And even after he got detained, they tried to fight his case, but she said it was much more difficult than she had imagined it would be. And she wished that the system was more fair. She felt like it wasn't really fair for them.
PAVLOVICH: Molly, there have been complaints of abuses at the detention center. What are the claims and have there been any investigations into what's been going on behind the facility’s doors?
HENNESSY-FISKE: There have been complaints at this particular center for years, but then also at the others in Louisiana as well as in Texas where I live. And I have visited some of the detention centers. They range over a variety of issues from conditions at the centers to how detainees are treated. There was kind of an uprising by detainees at the detention center in Winnfield, allegations that pepper spray was used. And that was getting investigated under President Biden, but then the office that was supposedly investigating it got done away with under this most recent Trump administration. And then it sort of was restored, but it's not clear whether they're still investigating that or what's gonna happen with those complaints at Winnfield or at some of these other facilities, there's this big question of what's going to happen with oversight, internal oversight of these federal agencies like ICE under Trump.
PAVLOVICH: What are some of the other communities that are a part of this corridor and are they seeing the same economic boosts?
HENNESSY-FISKE: Well, like there's Jena for instance, which is where Mohammad Khalil was held and recently released.
There've been some other students who were detained by the Trump administration, who were held in Basile, I think is another one. I hope I'm pronouncing it right. I don't trust my pronunciations when it comes to Louisiana. I have to get schooled. But there was a female student who was held there and released actually while I was in Winnfield covering this other story. And they have spoken a little bit, I think about being held there, the experience of being held, of trying to visit their families. All of these communities are different though. Winnfield I went to because it was the biggest in terms of the number of beds at the facilities. Also, the town was small enough that people would know about it and I felt like would have it top of mind and be thinking about it versus even a place like Monroe or Alexandria where they have facilities, but they also have a lot of other things like a university or a lot of businesses. People wouldn't necessarily know about it.
