Angola, Louisiana
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The Trump administration is opening a new detention camp within a notorious state prison in Louisiana to house undocumented migrants accused of committing crimes, officials announced Wednesday.
The new detention center, called “Camp 57,” will be at the country’s largest maximum-security prison, the Louisiana State Penitentiary, commonly known as Angola, an 18,000-acre facility located an hour north of Baton Rouge. It will have the capacity to house over 400 men, Louisiana Republican Gov. Jeff Landry said at a press conference Wednesday, half of whom will be sent there by the end of September.
Administration officials said Camp 57 is designed to hold the “worst of the worst” and pointed to it as a sign of success amid their ongoing campaigns against both illegal immigration and violent crime — both of which are key to Trump’s agenda.
The facility’s name is a nod to Landry, the state’s 57th governor, a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security told CNN. It is being repurposed from an existing facility that was not in use, Landry said.
Camp 57 is “not just a typical ICE detention facility that you may see in another state, somewhere else in this country,” Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem said Wednesday. “Instead, this facility will hold the most dangerous of criminals that have been out there harming individuals in this country.”
US Attorney General Pam Bondi said, “Louisiana, you’re going to be an example for the rest of this country.”
Though Camp 57 will be isolated from the prison’s normal criminal population, Louisiana’s prison system has been accused of forcing incarcerated individuals at Angola to work in dangerous conditions for little to no pay — including accusations that inmates were made to pick vegetables by hand in temperatures over 100 degrees at what was once a slave plantation.
In 2021, a judge found that Angola was providing inadequate medical care to its incarcerated population.
Noem said Wednesday that the prison’s infamous reputation was “absolutely” a reason officials chose it as the location for Camp 57.
“This is a facility that’s notorious,” Noem said.
“But that’s a message that these individuals that are going to be here, that are illegal criminals, need to understand,” she continued. “If you come into this country and you victimize someone … there’s consequences. You’re going to end up here.”
The Trump administration’s plan to open the detention ICE facility in Louisiana comes it has sought to open several immigration detention centers in other Republican-led states.
The administration tried to convert a remote training airport in Florida to a detention center dubbed “Alligator Alcatraz,” but a US district judge upheld her decision last week ordering operations to wind down indefinitely. Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis also announced a facility called “Deportation Depot,” which will be located in a temporarily closed state prison about 45 miles west of Jacksonville.
Last month, Nebraska announced plans for an immigration detention center in the remote southwest corner of the state to be dubbed the “Cornhusker Clink.”
