Following Mass Layoffs, Advocates Demand Full Closure of Louisiana Prison, Releases Not Transfers, and Healthy Jobs for Locals

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE 
Contact: media@freedomforimmigrants.org

NEW ORLEANS — Private prison company GEO Group is reportedly ending its operations of the Pine Prairie ICE Processing Center (Pine Prairie), a remote immigration detention center in Pine Prairie, Louisiana, with a heinous record of abuse and torture. The company will lay off 119 employees. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has stated its intent to continue using the detention facility through its agreement with Evangeline Parish. The Southeast Dignity Not Detention Coalition, including those formerly detained at Pine Prairie, are calling for the full closure of the prison and for the release of all who remain detained. 

Yenni Petit, a Haitian asylum seeker who was detained at Pine Prairie for three months in 2021, said: 

“I fled my home country because of transphobic violence and when I got to Pine Prairie, they subjected me to more of it. They denied me my hormone therapy and kept me in a small, cold cell alone for two months. Then they lied and said they did it because I asked for protection. I never asked to be tortured. I almost lost my mind in there.”

Mich González, associate executive director of Freedom for Immigrants, said: 

“Regardless of who has managaged Pine Prairie, this prison has been defined by its racism against Black people, punitive abuse of solitary confinement, and other mistreatment amounting to torture. We know who GEO Group is — profiteers of human misery, whether it be the misery of the people they cage or the people they exploit to work in dangerous and life-threatening conditions, only to lay them off and skip town. We demand the full closure of Pine Prairie and releases, not transfers, of everyone who remains detained. We won’t stand by while they torture people with solitary confinement and violent transfers during which people are shackled, waist chained and handcuffed for hours on end without food or water.” 

Rose Murray, an immigrant rights attorney and member of the Southeast Dignity Not Detention Coalition, said:

"Failing to fully and permanently close this prison now would be a lose-lose situation. The continued use or repurposing of Pine Prairie would carry on the criminalization and incarceration of Black, brown and Indigenous community members. And after fighting so hard to decarcerate their state, the people of Louisiana and Evangeline Parish deserve better than more prisons by another name — they deserve healthy, well-paid and sustainable jobs. GEO Group’s mass layoffs underscore the urgent need to transition prison economies into life-affirming economic development for local communities.”

RELATED RESOURCES

• Mother Jones: “Louisiana Decided to Curb Mass Incarceration. Then ICE Showed Up.”

• 2020 federal complaint detailing how prison officials used unnecessary lethal force to place Black immigrants in chokeholds and threaten them with solitary confinement at gunpoint at the Pine Prairie ICE Processing Center in Pine Prairie, Louisiana. 

• 2021 federal complaint detailing civil and human rights violations committed against individuals including punitive solitary confinement to segregate individuals who have contracted COVID-19 or have experienced other medical and mental health crises and punishing immigrants with solitary confinement when they speak out against these injustices.

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Freedom for Immigrants (FFI) is devoted to abolishing immigration detention, while ending the isolation of people currently suffering in this profit-driven system. FFI monitors the human rights abuses faced by immigrants detained by ICE through a national hotline and network of volunteer detention visitors, while promoting community-based services that welcome immigrants into the social fabric of the United States. Learn more: https://www.freedomforimmigrants.org/