Welcome to the nation’s ‘super deportation center,’ inspired by Amazon and FedEx but ‘with human beings’
After he was arrested outside his Virginia apartment in March, Georgetown University professor Badar Khan Suri was briefly detained in the state before being put on a plane bound for an immigration detention center more than 1,000 miles away.
Suri — who was targeted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement for his Palestinian activism and his family ties to Gaza — arrived at the only ICE facility that doubles as an airport, without his attorneys having any idea where he was.
Officers told Suri that he had entered the nation’s “super deportation center,” according to his attorneys.
The college professor was shackled at the ankles and handcuffed then marched into a 70,000 square foot “staging facility” in Alexandria, Louisiana, which has emerged as the nexus point for President Donald Trump’s mass deportation machine.
Suri is far from alone. Since Trump returned to the White House, more than 20,000 people en route to other detention centers have passed through the Louisiana facility — which ICE officials have long aspired to operate like corporate giants FedEx and Amazon.
ICE’s acting director Todd Lyons has bluntly compared the movement of people to packages.
“We need to get better at treating this like a business, where this mass deportation operation is something like you would see and say, like, Amazon trying to get your Prime delivery within 24 hours,” Lyons told a law enforcement conference in Phoenix earlier this year.
“So, trying to figure out how to do that with human beings,” he said.
The idea of “running the government like a business” has taken root inside ICE over the last decade with lucrative public-private partnerships between the federal government and for-profit contractors, which operate roughly 90 percent of all ICE detention centers.
Since before the Trump administration, the ICE field office in New Orleans — which is responsible for removal operations in Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Tennessee — was modeling operations after shipping giant FedEx and its “spoke-hub” model.
Detainees are temporarily held in detention “hubs” before they’re sent to a network of detention center “spokes” where they wait to be deported.
In Suri’s case, he arrived at the Alexandria “hub” before he was moved to a regional “spoke” in Texas.
The idea for a staging facility in Louisiana “started on a cocktail napkin” at Ruth’s Chris steakhouse, according to Philip Miller, a former ICE official in New Orleans who went on to work for an IT firm that contracts with federal law enforcement.
Miller sought “a more effective and efficient way of moving the growing number of foreign detainees,” according to 2015 newsletter from GEO Group, the private prison contractor that operates the Alexandria facility.
