A New ICE Facility Could Speed Up Deportations for Vulnerable Children

God calls us to protect the vulnerable–especially our children. Yet a new detention facility rising outside Alexandria, Louisiana, this summer will hold migrant kids and families within steps of the nation's busiest deportation runway. 

The Trump administration is moving forward with a 528-bed holding facility for migrant families and unaccompanied children, located next to Alexandria International Airport, the nation's largest hub for deportation flights. More than 4,400 immigration enforcement flights passed through that airport in 2025 alone. The goal is to streamline deportations by keeping families and children near the runway rather than scattered across foster homes and shelters nationwide.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is calling it a "staging area," not a detention center, and says families would stay no more than a few days. But child welfare advocates have heard similar assurances before — and watched them fall short, pointing to other federal immigration holding sites where children were held for weeks or months.

Migrant Children Outside the System That Protects Them

Under current federal law, unaccompanied children who arrive in the United States without parents or close relatives are not placed in ICE custody. They are transferred to state-licensed shelters and foster care programs overseen by the Office of Refugee Resettlement, a division of the Department of Health and Human Services. That agency exists specifically to ensure vulnerable children receive appropriate care, education, and legal support.

The Alexandria facility bypasses that framework entirely. The Office of Refugee Resettlement has no role in its operation. Instead, the facility will be managed by a nonprofit arm of LaSalle Corrections, a private prison contractor that runs detention centers and correctional facilities across Louisiana, including the "Louisiana Lockup" inside the state's maximum-security Angola prison.

"It's an expansion of the deportation system in ways we haven't seen before," said Leecia Welch, chief legal counsel at the nonprofit Children's Rights. "There's just so much that could go wrong with this facility."

A Contractor With a Troubled Record

Two detainees have died since April at a separate LaSalle-run ICE facility in Louisiana. In June, the Department of Homeland Security's Office of Inspector General found that LaSalle's Winn Correctional Center had violated standards governing environmental health and safety, food service, use of force, and medical care.

This is the same company now being contracted to house these unaccompanied migrant children and families.

ICE planning documents reviewed by the AP state that families at the facility "are in the legal custody of ICE and can only be released at the direction of ICE." The agency has instructed contractors not to refer to families as prisoners, detainees, or inmates, and ordered that no bars or cages be used during transport. Families will be permitted to wear their own clothes and will not be subject to headcounts.

The language reflects an attempt to soften the facility's presentation. But child advocates warn that regardless of what it is called, it is a holding facility run by a private prison operator, outside the normal child welfare system, located on the grounds of the country's busiest deportation airport.

"Volunteering to Go Home"

Ralph Hennessy runs England Airpark, the former military base that was redeveloped into Alexandria International Airport — the property where the facility is being built. As the local authority overseeing the site, he has described the project in favorable terms."These are people that are volunteering to go back home and they're going back home as a family unit," he said.

Advocates who work with immigrant families tell a different story. Many parents and children, they say, agree to leave because they feel they have no choice, or because no one explained to them that they did.

The Alexandria facility could be operational as early as August. Compass Connections, a Texas-based nonprofit that originally partnered to help operate it and that specializes in care for unaccompanied immigrant children, has since withdrawn. The company's president told the AP it was no longer involved but offered no explanation.

For people of faith who believe in the dignity of every child, the questions raised here are moral ones. The wellbeing of children in government custody is not a matter of debate — it is a responsibility. And right now, the system built to protect those children is being asked to step aside.