1 day ago
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Washington:
The US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has transported immigrant students and scholars arrested in connection with pro-Palestine protests to detention facilities thousands of miles away in the far south, according to multiple reports.
Immigration officials detained Mahmoud Khalil at his New York residence on March 8. The following night, the Columbia University graduate student slept in a detention facility in a remote area of Louisiana, over three hours away from the nearest city.
Georgetown University Professor Badar Khan Suri was initially transported to Louisiana and then to a Texas jail facility after being detained close to Washington, DC.
Agents took Tufts student Rumeysa Ozturk off the street outside Boston and checked her into a private prison in rural southern Louisiana less than a day later.
These transfers highlight the authority ICE has on choosing where to keep detained migrants. Immigration lawyers argued the Trump administration was abusing its authority by relocating individuals far from their legal representation, families, and support networks.
At least 14 of the country's 20 largest immigration detention facilities are primarily located in Louisiana, Texas, and Mississippi. In the past, both Democratic and Republican administrations have used them as a hub for the incarceration of immigrants.
Civil rights groups have referred to these centres as "black holes," where people are held in appalling conditions, NPR reported.
ICE, for its part, cited logistics and pragmatism as justifications for its transfer decisions.
On its website, the agency states that it employs "limited detention resources to detain aliens to secure their presence for immigration proceedings or removal from the United States" and that detention is "non-punitive."
Government attorneys claimed in court documents that ICE moved Khalil, Khan Suri, and Ozturk to Louisiana due to the lack of beds or "detention space" in facilities near their arrest sites.
Most immigration detention centres are located along Mexico's southern border. After Texas, Louisiana currently has the second-highest number of detainees nationwide.
Adriel D. Orozco, senior policy counsel at immigrant advocacy organisation American Immigration Council, clarified that transfers always occurred "within the immigration system", but he had not seen such a drastic transfer system, "in the sense of sending folks from the Northeast all the way down to the South."
It appeared "more of a change under this Trump 2.0," Orozco told CNN.
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