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Poor conditions at Louisiana ICE detention center holding Tufts student, advocates say [1]

['Jesús Marrero Suárez', 'More']

Date: 2025-04-10

Former detainees have described punitive and unsanitary conditions at the all-female Louisiana detention facility where immigration officials are holding a Turkish student from Tufts University.

Dozens of women detained at the South Louisiana ICE Processing Center in Basile, Louisiana, reported having been denied medical care, given insufficient feminine hygiene supplies or served rotten food, according to an August 2024 report by immigration advocates based on facility visits and interviews with detainees.

The Basile detention center is where U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has been holding Tufts PhD student Rümeysa Öztürk, after plainclothes immigration officers handcuffed and took her away from Somerville in an unmarked SUV last month. Prosecutors claimed there was no available bed space for women in New England detention centers, although immigration attorneys in other states have filed sworn declarations disputing that.

“The government quietly and quickly hopscotched Ms. Öztürk across multiple states in a concerted effort to evade accountability," said Carol Rose, executive director of the ACLU of Massachusetts, which is representing Öztürk. "She never should have been grabbed from her street in Somerville and secretly moved over 1,300 miles away from her community."

The Basile facility, located about 90 miles west of Baton Rouge, is one of four in the state run by GEO Group, a multibillion-dollar prison company that contracts with the federal government to hold U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detainees across its sprawling network of detention facilities.

There are nine immigration detention facilities in Louisiana, with a combined capacity of about 6,000 people. It is the second-largest detention network in the country, behind Texas.

This image is a screengrab of the South Louisiana ICE Processing Center from Google Earth. Labels were created by Google Earth. (Screenshot from Google Earth)

Many of GEO’s facilities, including the one in Basile, are repurposed prison or jails located in rural areas where ICE holds hundreds of people in detention as they undergo administrative proceedings to determine if they’ll be deported, according to the report.

In a statement to WBUR, a GEO Group spokesperson said the company “strongly disagrees” with the report’s claims that it mistreats detainees.

“These allegations are part of a long-standing, politically motivated, and radical campaign to abolish ICE and end federal immigration detention by attacking the federal government's immigration facility contractors,” the statement said.

GEO Group said it manages facilities in accordance with standards set by the Department of Homeland Security, and that federal auditors regularly monitor compliance.

DHS and ICE did not respond to requests for comment.

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Anthony Enriquez is one of the authors of the report on the centers’ conditions and vice president of U.S. advocacy and litigation at Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights, an international rights group.

He said Öztürk, the Tufts student, is at risk of facing what many immigrants detained in Louisiana describe: “That's being cut off from legal resources that could help protect them from human rights abuses,” he said. “That's filthy and inhumane living conditions. That's punishing abuse from guards, and exposure to dangerous living conditions.”

Öztürk, who has asthma and was detained without the daily medication she takes for it, has suffered at least three asthma attacks since her detention, according to court filings. Her attorneys have not responded to questions regarding her condition or whether she has since obtained that medication, but they have demanded her immediate release in federal court.

“Each day Ms. Öztürk remains in detention puts her life at risk, prolongs the government's unjustified retaliation, and reinforces the broad chill already cast on other noncitizens who will fear they could be next,” her attorneys said in court.

Öztürk is one of at least three students ICE has moved to Louisiana after detaining them in another state. The others are Palestinian graduate student Mahmoud Khalil, of Columbia University, and Alireza Doroudi, an Iranian doctoral student at the University of Alabama.

Rümeysa Öztürk. (Photo courtesy Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Study and Human Development at Tufts University)

Conditions across Louisiana’s detention centers resemble criminal incarceration, according to the report. Detainees work for a dollar a day in cleaning and other tasks usually reserved for minimum-wage workers, so they can buy food at the commissary. Guards have used solitary confinement punitively, at times against people in distress.

One woman who’d been incarcerated in Aliceville, Alabama, on a crime prior to her detention by ICE, compared life at the Basile center to her experience in prison.

“In many ways, the conditions here are the same,” she said in the report. “I’m wearing a jumpsuit. I’m surrounded by barbed wire. I can’t go to the yard without permission from guards.”

There are other issues too, she said, like having to represent herself in her legal case (unlike in criminal proceedings, immigrants in immigration court do not have the constitutional right to a government-paid attorney). She claimed the guards "mock us just for being immigrants.”

There have been efforts over the years to hold ICE and GEO Group accountable for alleged mistreatment. In 2017, a federal jury in Washington found the company owed former detainees $17.3 million in back pay after finding the $1 a day policy violated Washington's minimum wage law.

In 2022, an oversight agency within the Department of Homeland Security investigated the Basile facility after "several complaints alleging concerns related to unsanitary conditions and sexual harassment." They issued ICE a memo with 47 recommendations related to "conditions of detention, medical care, mental health care, and environmental health and safety."

In response, ICE “concurred” with nine recommendations, "partially concurred with three" and "non-concurred" with the other 35.

Enriquez said little has changed at the center since the advocacy group’s 2024 report was published.

“We haven't seen meaningful improvements to any of the conditions that we reported on,” Enriquez said, adding that poor treatment of detainees has been long-term and systemic across Louisiana’s network of facilities.

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[1] Url: https://www.wbur.org/news/2025/04/10/ozturk-louisiana-ice-detention-conditions-trump

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