In his second term, President Donald Trump has searched far and wide for a fearsome prison to call his own. He sent immigrant detainees to the Guantánamo Bay Navy base in early February and floated plans (that soon fizzled) to hold 30,000 people there. In March, he shipped planeloads of detainees to the CECOT megaprison in El Salvador. Trump has said he wants to reopen the federal penitentiary on Alcatraz Island in the San Francisco Bay, and has been so hung up on the branding that he opened a tent camp in the Florida swamps this summer that officials promoted as “Alligator Alcatraz.” But the future of that site is looking shaky too, and the administration has been forced to move detainees out of the facility after a federal court last month found that it violated environmental laws.
The maximum-security penitentiary in Angola, Louisiana, is the latest entry in Trump’s casting call. Yesterday Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Attorney General Pam Bondi held a press conference with Louisiana Republican Governor Jeff Landry to announce that they have moved 51 ICE detainees into a wing of the prison called Camp J. The administration plans to house about 400 ICE detainees—“the worst of the worst’’—at the facility. Once known as “The Dungeon,” Camp J was formerly used to lock inmates in solitary confinement, but the wing has been closed for years after falling into disrepair.
Built on an 18,000-acre former plantation along a bend in the Mississippi River, the prison dates to 1901, and Louisiana officials bill it as the nation’s largest maximum-security penitentiary. In the 1960s and ’70s Angola earned a reputation for stabbings, riots, and squalor. It later drew documentary filmmakers and news crews that reported on its vocational programs and the rollicking annual rodeo it stages in a 10,000-seat arena, which is open to the public.
ICE facilities are meant to hold detainees temporarily while they await deportation, not to serve criminal prison sentences. But Noem told reporters the “legendary” Angola site will send a resounding message to would-be lawbreakers: “If you come into this country and you victimize someone, if you take away their child forever, if you traffic drugs and kill our next generation of Americans and if you traffic our children … you’re going to end up here.”
“We’re going to throw the book at you and everything else we have until you’re out of this country,” Noem said. Her message echoed the one she delivered months earlier, standing before a prison block in El Salvador stacked from floor to ceiling with tattooed gang members.
Noem and her staff have nicknamed the Angola facility the “Louisana Lockup.” It’s the latest in a series of new ICE detention centers that Trump officials have labeled with alliterative nicknames that make them sound like trading cards. They include the “Speedway Slammer” in Indiana and the “Cornhusker Clink” in Nebraska.
Landry told reporters that inmates don’t try to escape from Angola, because the prison is bordered by the Mississippi River and surrounded by “swamps filled with alligators and forests filled with bears.” The ICE detainees held at Angola will not interact with the general inmate population. “There’s no mixing over here,” he said. “All of the camps are completely isolated from one another.”
Noem and other Trump officials say the infamy of their detention facilities helps the president’s mass-deportation agenda by scaring more immigrants into voluntarily self-deporting to their home countries. Immigrants who commit crimes are subject to the same criminal consequences as any U.S. citizen. Those convicted of violent or other serious offenses are typically handed over to ICE only after they complete their sentences in state prisons or local jails. ICE then sends them to an immigration-detention facility to await deportation. Noem said 200 more ICE detainees from around the United States would arrive at the site in the coming weeks. One of the people Noem said would be sent there is a convict whom ICE says it deported to Cuba several weeks ago.
Kings and despots have always relied on prisons to instill fear. They’re a common feature of today’s autocratic regimes, from Iran to Russia to Venezuela. The United States has had its own notorious lockups—Leavenworth, San Quentin, Alcatraz—but U.S. presidents don’t typically treat their fearsome reputations as a domestic-policy tool.
Trump has mused openly about subjecting immigrants, as well as U.S. citizens, to harsher punishment, and said he’s directed aides to assess the legality of banishing American-citizen offenders to the El Salvador megaprison where, until recently, no one had ever emerged alive.
Eunice Cho, an attorney who runs the ACLU National Prison Project, which monitors immigration detention, told me the message the Trump administration is trying to send by selecting Angola is “another example of the Trump administration’s attempt to use facilities that are notoriously associated with histories of abuse and deprivation.”
Immigration detention “is an entirely civil status, and it is supposed to be a place where people are held while they are awaiting adjudication of their civil immigration cases. It is not supposed to be punitive at all. That is underscored by federal law, and the Supreme Court,” Cho told me.
“The detention of people at a prison that is known to have brutal conditions of confinement raises serious questions as to whether or not the government is engaging in unconstitutional, punitive conditions of confinement,” she added. Cho declined to say if the ACLU was preparing to challenge the administration in court.
The Angola site is the 10th detention center ICE operates in Louisiana, which has more than any other state. The latest government data show ICE is holding more than 61,000 detainees nationwide, a record. The “big, beautiful bill” Trump signed in July included $45 billion to double ICE detention capacity to more than 100,000 beds. The agency tends to get a far warmer welcome in Republican-run states, especially in the South, where wages are lower and rural counties are hungry for jobs.
At a hiring expo I attended outside Dallas last week, ICE officials told applicants that the agency has more entry-level openings in Louisiana than any other part of the country. Many of those jobs are in the for-profit detention centers that feed into ICE’s main hub for deportation flights, the Alexandria Staging Facility, a two-hour drive from Angola.
There are close ties between Trump’s DHS leaders and Louisiana. Corey Lewandowski, the longtime Trump retainer who has been serving as a “special government employee” at DHS and the unofficial chief of staff for Noem, is close to Landry and helped run the governor’s 2023 campaign. Madison Sheahan, who worked with Noem when she was governor of South Dakota and remains one of her closest aides, previously ran the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries. Noem installed Sheahan, a 28-year-old with no federal law-enforcement experience, as the deputy director of ICE. Sheahan shared the stage Wednesday with Landry, Noem, and Bondi and said the new facility at Angola will provide detainees the same access to attorneys, videoconference rooms, and other resources available at other ICE detention sites.
“This is a model for the country of what ICE is expecting from our partners,” Sheahan told reporters.
DHS did not respond to questions about how much the department will pay Louisiana to house immigrant detainees, nor the terms of any operating agreements with the private contractors Landry said would help run the ICE facility. And DHS and ICE did not respond to questions about what role, if any, Lewandowski played in facilitating the deal. Landry said the facility would operate “in the black” at a profit. “That was the instructions I got from the White House,” he told reporters.
Trump officials are hoping the Angola site will be on surer legal footing than “Alligator Alcatraz.” A federal judge in Florida told the state last month it had to shut down the tent camp, built on an isolated airstrip in the middle of the Everglades. The judge said the tent camp’s hasty construction had bypassed public-input requirements and an environmental-impact study. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, a Republican, and Trump officials have appealed the ruling, but the state says it may lose $218 million if it’s required to shutter the site.
Landry used emergency authorities to order the quick renovation of the Angola prison’s Camp J section in order to accept ICE detainees. His staff has nicknamed the wing “Camp 57,” as Landry is Louisiana’s 57th governor, and freshly painted lettering provided a press-conference backdrop. Adding confusion, DHS officials have called it “Camp 47” because Trump is the 47th president.
As Landry and the Trump officials toured the ICE wing, Sheahan at one point invited Noem to enter a cell where ICE detainees will be held, according to video released by Forbes. Sheahan explained to her that the cell had “bedsheets and all that stuff.” The two appeared to share a joke and emerged smiling, then continued inspecting the other cells. “They look great,” Sheahan said.
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