A coalition of immigrant rights organizations is urging the federal government to stop housing immigration detainees at Winn Correctional Center, a privately run former Louisiana state prison, citing what they say is a long history of violence, abuse and negligence.
In a letter to Secretary of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas, the group of 39 organizations – including the American Civil Liberties Union of Louisiana, Immigration Services Louisiana, Al Otro Lado – pleaded with Mayorkas to not renew its contract at Winn when it ends on May 15, 2024.
“Shut the facility down and stop using it to jail any population of people again,” the letter to Mayorkas said.
Winn Correctional Center, located in Winn Parish, came under national scrutiny following an investigation by Mother Jones reporter Shane Bauer, who went undercover to work there as a guard in 2014, finding repeated instances of excessive force by guards, a culture of ignoring or even condoning sexual violence inside the prison and chronic mismanagement by its then-operator, Nashville-based private prison company Corrections Corporation of America (now CoreCivic).
Some things have changed since then. In 2015, the facility was taken over by another private prison operator — Ruston-based LaSalle Corrections. And it is no longer used primarily to house state inmates. Since 2019, it has operated under contract with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and now the overwhelming majority of people there are in ICE custody.
But according to the civil rights groups, the pattern of abuse at Winn remains.
Representatives from ICE and from LaSalle Corrections did not immediately respond to requests for comment from Verite News.
The letter included a report from Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights, the National Immigration Project, Detention Watch Network and the Southeast Dignity Not Detention Coalition called “Anthology of Abuse: Violence and Neglect at the Winn Correctional Center” that laid out alleged civil rights violations and abusive practices at the facility. Among them: allegations that Winn staff subjected detainees to lengthy and punitive solitary confinement as well as reports that guards directed racist, homophobic and transphobic comments to residents and threatened LGBTQ+ and HIV positive immigrants with violence.
The report highlighted complaints of guards using force, including deploying pepper spray, to stop protests by detainees, many of whom are there after allegedly violating civil immigration law and have not been charged with, let alone convicted of, a crime.
One complaint to the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, from February 2021, alleged that guards at Winn violently forced Cameroonian detainees at the facility to fingerprint documents acknowledging their deportations.
Later that year, the Homeland Security investigators issued a memo that said ICE should stop transferring immigrants to Winn because of a “culture and conditions that can lead to abuse” and that the population at Winn should be reduced to zero, “until immediate health and safety concerns can be corrected.”
“ICE blatantly disregarded that and decided to increase the population,” Sarah Decker, a staff attorney at RFK Human Rights, said.
Winn Correctional Center had an average daily population of 1,462 detainees on November 27, according to data analyzed by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University.
Decker said immigrants detained at the facility continued to experience human rights abuses and severe medical and mental health neglect. The report said that one detainee at Winn removed a cyst from his stomach himself to avoid infection and alleged that guards used racist, homophobic and transphobic language toward detainees.
Decker said language access is also a problem.
ICE has already stopped using one detention center in South Louisiana, Pine Prairie ICE Processing Center, as the facility, run by private prison giant GEO Group, was having difficulty maintaining adequate staffing levels.
Decker said ICE has begun transferring detainees from Pine Prairie to Winn, further expanding the facility’s detention population.
“We’re going to be seeing an uptick in reports of abuses that are associated with ICE increasing populations of jails that already have a record of systemic flaws and Human Rights Issues,” she warned.
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