ICE's New Family Detention Model in Louisiana

ICE's Louisiana Family Facility Signals a New Detention Model

ICE will open a 528-bed family holding site at England Airpark, run by LaSalle Corrections' nonprofit arm — a design that routes migrant children out of HHS custody and directly onto deportation flights.

The Trump administration will open a 528-bed holding facility for migrant families and unaccompanied children at England Airpark in Alexandria, Louisiana, as early as August 2026 — and the choice of operator, location, and legal category is engineered to solve a single problem: how to move children onto deportation flights without triggering the child-welfare rules that have constrained ICE for a generation. The facility, sited beside what is now the country's largest deportation-flight hub, will be run through the LaSalle Family Foundation, the nonprofit arm of private-prison operator LaSalle Corrections. It is labeled a "72-hour staging area" — a category that exists nowhere in the Flores Settlement Agreement, and one a federal court refused to bless in an August 2025 ruling.

This is not an incremental capacity expansion. It is the first purpose-built node fusing custody of unaccompanied children with the physical infrastructure of removal — concentrating leverage in ICE's contractor system at the moment federal oversight of that system is thinning and the detention population has nearly doubled in a year.

What is actually being built

ICE signed the contract in late June 2026, according to Ralph Hennessy, executive director of the England Airpark Authority, whose remarks were first reported by the Associated Press via PBS NewsHour. The site sits on the former England Air Force Base in Rapides Parish, immediately adjacent to Alexandria International Airport — the airfield through which Human Rights First's ICE Flight Monitor logged more than 4,400 immigration enforcement flights in 2025, making it the busiest deportation hub in the United States.

The operational fine print is unusual. ICE has instructed contractors that families "cannot be referred to as prisoners, detainees or inmates," that no bars or cages be used in transport, that headcounts not be required, and that families be allowed to wear their own clothes, according to records reviewed by AP. Yet the same planning documents state that families and children at the facility "are in the legal custody of ICE and can only be released at the direction of ICE." That is the tension at the heart of the project: the aesthetic of voluntariness, the legal reality of federal custody.

Compass Connections, a Texas nonprofit that runs licensed shelters for unaccompanied children and had originally been slated to help operate the site, withdrew in early July 2026, its president Sonya Thompson confirmed to AP. She did not elaborate. What remains is LaSalle Corrections and its nonprofit affiliate running a facility that will hold children — an arrangement Leecia Welch, chief legal counsel at Children's Rights, told AP is "an expansion of the deportation system in ways we haven't seen before."

The Flores workaround

Under the 1997 Flores Settlement Agreement, minors in federal custody must be placed "in the least restrictive setting" and, in practice, transferred within 72 hours to the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), a division of Health and Human Services that contracts with state-licensed shelters. The Alexandria facility is not licensed as a child-welfare shelter. ORR "isn't involved" in operating it, an airfield spokesperson confirmed to AP.

That matters legally. On August 8, 2025, U.S. District Judge Dolly Gee denied the government's motion to terminate Flores, writing that "no final regulations or changed circumstances yet merit termination of the Flores Agreement," according to the court's order. A companion enforcement order the same month barred the government from "restart[ing] the clock" when transferring a class member "from one unlicensed, secure facility to another, regardless of which DHS component agency operates the facility," per the court's enforcement ruling. In plain English: the 72-hour ceiling is cumulative across CBP, ICE, and any downstream contractor.

The Alexandria model tests that ceiling. In a July 2025 status report, Flores plaintiffs' counsel noted that ICE's own Juvenile Coordinator acknowledged use of "temporary staging space (hotels), and secure detention" while providing "no information as to the conditions of detention at these 'temporary staging spaces,'" according to the court filing. The same filing recorded that average time in CBP custody for children in family units reached 177 hours — roughly seven days — in March 2025, more than double the 72-hour target. The plaintiffs already believe ICE is running a shadow category of custody that evades Flores monitoring. England Airpark is the built-form version of that category.

Ninth Circuit precedent leaves the government fewer options than it may believe. In upholding Flores in 2022, the panel observed that when DHS encounters an accompanied minor it has three choices: release the family, detain the parent and release the child, or detain the family in an "appropriate family detention center" — and that "the Agreement flatly precludes" the government's preferred third option in the absence of licensed facilities, according to the Ninth Circuit opinion. Louisiana does not license family detention centers for the care of dependent minors. Renaming the site a "staging area" is the legal maneuver designed to avoid that fact.

Key facts at a glance

Who benefits — and the operator's record

The immediate beneficiary is the contractor. LaSalle Corrections is a family-owned firm founded by the McConnell family of central Louisiana; its facilities already hold roughly one in seven Louisiana state prisoners, according to a company profile filed in federal court records. The industry as a whole has posted historic gains under the current expansion: CoreCivic reported a more than 100% year-over-year rise in ICE revenue on its February 2026 quarterly call, NPR reported. The Alexandria airfield and the surrounding Rapides Parish economy are secondary winners; ICE's own defense of these projects, as offered to NPR, is that "new facilities would bring jobs, additional tax revenue and security to communities."

LaSalle's operational record is where the argument for concern lives. Two detainees have died since April 2026 at a LaSalle-run ICE facility in Louisiana, and the company's Winn Correctional Center was found in June 2026 to have violated standards on environmental health, food service, use-of-force, and medical care, AP reported. The Irwin County Detention Center in Georgia — previously operated by LaSalle — was shuttered in 2021 after a bipartisan Senate investigation into medical abuse of women held there, and reopened as an ICE detention center in 2025, according to NPR.

In 2020, whistleblowers at LaSalle's Richwood Correctional Center told the House Judiciary Committee that mismanagement of COVID-19 protocols contributed to detainee illnesses and two officer deaths, according to written Congressional testimony. Earlier, Human Rights Watch attorneys who visited LaSalle's Jena, Louisiana facility documented a single attorney visitation room, non-working phones, and alleged retaliatory use of solitary confinement, per the group's 2015 letter to ICE. The Southern Poverty Law Center's federal lawsuit against DHS over conditions at LaSalle's Jena facility — including denial of access to counsel — remains active, per the court's opinion in SPLC v. DHS.

This is the operator ICE has chosen to entrust with children.

The system-level shift

The Alexandria site should be read against a hub-and-spoke expansion. DHS documents obtained by NPR describe eight proposed "mega centers" of 7,500 to 10,000 beds each, fed by 16 regional processing centers of 500 to 1,500 beds. England Airpark, at 528 beds, fits the spoke profile exactly — and it is the first designed to specialize in children and families at the removal end of the pipeline.

The overall custody numbers explain the urgency. ICE held roughly 37,000 people in January 2025; by end-January 2026, that number had jumped past 72,000, with DHS targeting 92,600 beds by end of fiscal 2026 and a stated goal of 100,000, according to Al Jazeera. NPR's analysis of ICE FOIA data found that Louisiana alone accounted for 93,105 book-ins between January and mid-October 2025 — 45% of them at the existing Alexandria Staging Facility.

Deportation logistics reinforce the geography. In a December 2024 contract, DHS agreed to buy six Boeing 737s to launch its own removal fleet, and under the fiscal 2026 budget ICE plans an additional $3.6 billion for removal transportation — a projected sixfold annual increase from current spending, the Financial Times reported. The Alexandria facility is the ground-side counterpart to that airlift.

The "self-deport" framing and the ORR pipeline

Hennessy told AP the facility exists to help families that are "self-deporting" — "people that are volunteering to go back home." That framing is legally consequential. If departure is voluntary, several downstream rights recede: the immigration-judge hearing, the individualized bond redetermination required under Flores paragraph 24.A, and — for children with pending sponsor placements — the ORR release process governed by the Unaccompanied Children Program Foundational Rule, which took effect July 1, 2024.

Whether that framing survives contact with reality is the open question. In December 2025 reporting, NPR documented that ORR staff had been given a verbal order to halt sponsor releases: in the six weeks before publication, ORR released only four unaccompanied children to family sponsors nationwide, down from roughly 100 per month. In February 2025, NPR also reported that additional ICE personnel were granted access to the ORR database of unaccompanied children — reviving a first-term Trump-era information-sharing arrangement that immigrant-rights groups warn is used to identify undocumented sponsors. Attorneys interviewed by NPR said the combined pressure of stalled sponsor releases and enforcement risk to family members was leading more children to "choose" to leave the country. The Alexandria facility is the operational endpoint of that pressure.

The oversight vacuum

Federal oversight of ICE contractors has been criticized for years. The DHS Office of Inspector General has repeatedly found contractor inspections inadequate, with Nakamoto Group audits described as "too broad" and unable to reasonably cover 650 elements in three days, per a Congressional Research Service brief. The same brief catalogs a decade of GAO and OIG reports flagging medical-care failures, including the January 2022 OIG finding on "Medical Processes and Communication Protocols" at Irwin County — LaSalle's former Georgia site.

In 2025, at least 37 people died in ICE detention — the deadliest year in more than two decades, according to remarks entered in the Congressional Record on February 4, 2026, which put total deaths across DHS custody since January 2025 at 45. H. Res. 1030 records the toll and calls for repeal of the multi-year $75 billion ICE appropriation, per the House resolution text. It will not pass a Republican House. But its factual predicate — the death counts, the named operators — is now part of the congressional record against which ICE's contractors will be measured.

The historical parallel

The design of England Airpark has a clear antecedent: the T. Don Hutto Residential Center outside Austin, opened in 2006 as a converted high-security prison and used to hold entire migrant families, including infants, in prison uniforms. NPR's 2007 dispatch recorded a facility holding 375 people, more than 200 of them children, with a stated maximum of 512. Hutto's population collapsed after Flores litigation constrained family detention, and it lost its "punitive punch," as NPR later put it. The Alexandria site is Hutto's second-generation successor — rebuilt without the uniforms and bars, rebranded away from the language of detention, and physically bolted to the airfield so children spend the shortest possible time in a courtroom's reach.

What to watch

• The Flores court's next enforcement move. Under the August 2025 order, plaintiffs can seek expedited relief if the Alexandria facility's "staging" designation is used to hold class members beyond 72 hours cumulative in DHS custody.
• The LaSalle Family Foundation's IRS Form 990 disclosures. Whether the nonprofit's contract with ICE draws suit under the "commerciality doctrine" is a live question given LaSalle Corrections' operational involvement, confirmed in email by CFO Tim Kurpiewski to AP.
• August 2026 opening date. Any first-72-hour lawsuit will define whether the "staging" category survives judicial scrutiny — or whether ICE has built a $75-billion-backed detention model without a legal chassis.

The Bottom Line

The bottom line: ICE's England Airpark facility is not a shelter and not, in ICE's telling, a detention center — it is a legal category invented to route children onto deportation flights faster than Flores allows a licensed facility to be built. The choice of LaSalle Corrections, whose Louisiana sites have logged deaths, standards violations, and a decade of oversight complaints, is the tell: the administration is prioritizing removal throughput over the child-welfare architecture Congress and the courts spent thirty years constructing.