GEO was no stranger to Jena, and Jena no stranger to GEO. They’d been partners for years, back before the Jena facility had been retrofitted for immigrant detention, back before GEO was even called GEO. Now the facility was one of the largest employers in the area: 250 jobs. It was also one of the region’s biggest taxpayers.
The remote facility had grown into a central node in a newly established network of immigrant detention centers that span central Louisiana. Immigration advocates refer to this region as “the black hole,” a place where people disappear into overcrowded detention, sometimes for years, often without ever seeing a lawyer or being convicted of a crime. Others are whisked onto deportation flights, headed for countries they’ve fled or never been to. One place where people who have been brought to Jena rarely end up is back at their American homes, in the lives they were living before agents banged on their front doors or raided their workplaces or pulled them over for a traffic stop...
Around the same time, Jena was back in the national news for its youth again—not its youth detention center but its namesake public high school. A year earlier, nooses had been hung from a tree at Jena High School after some Black students sat beneath it. (The tree was most commonly a purlieu for white students.) In the subsequent weeks, fighting ensued. One white student pulled a gun, and other white students smashed bottles over the head of a Black student. That Black student and a group of his friends beat up a white student and knocked him unconscious. In the end, the Black students were arrested—the Jena Six, they were soon called—and charged with attempted murder.
It became a national flashpoint. Then-Sen. Hillary Clinton said Jena “reminds us that the scales of justice are seriously out of balance when it comes to charging, sentencing, and punishing African Americans.” Al Sharpton claimed that it was the new frontier of the Civil Rights Movement...
In Jena, everyone knew someone who worked at the ICE facility, and also no one knew anything. Friends, a cousin, a sister, a granddaughter, former co-workers, friends of friends. No one had heard anything about it, no one was picking up the phone, everyone would be back tomorrow and just so happened to be busy at the moment.
At the doughnut shop, and again at the café, I was told that there were regularly ICE detention center employees but that I had only just missed them each time I arrived. At the drive-thru liquor store, which featured flags hanging from the rafters of Trump riding on a tank and Jesus grasping an American flag, one employee told me her ex-husband worked there. But she, too, knew nothing about it, wouldn’t call him, didn’t want to talk about it.
At the local hospital, one employee told me that they did indeed have detainees show up for medical attention, accompanied by officials from the facility, but three other administrators came running to say that they could not and would not speak about that.
At one of the town’s many churches, I spoke with a woman who feared social retribution for saying anything. “It’s a really tight-knit community,” she warned.