A private prison company will run new ICE children’s facility–and IRS pros have questions
ICE (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement) plans to open a new 528-bed facility for migrant families and unaccompanied children inside a Louisiana airport, AP reported this week.
The facility will be run by the nonprofit arm of a private prison company that has reported deaths of two detainees since April at one of its facilities in the state.
The new ICE facility at England Airpark in Louisiana will be run by the nonprofit arm of Louisiana-based LaSalle Corrections, a private prison contractor, according to Ralph Hennessy, executive director of the England Airpark Authority. The official contractor for the new ICE facility is the LaSalle Family Foundation, LaSalle Corrections’ nonprofit arm, a tax-exempt organization, AP reported.
Whether LaSalle Corrections’ nonprofit arm, LaSalle Family Foundation, may be violating federal tax rules is “a valid question,” said Josh Starin, attorney at law firm Shell Bray, in an interview with Impactivize. Starin previously spent 13 years at the Internal Revenue Service as a subject matter expert on major technical, procedural, and administrative issues for the IRS Tax-Exempt/Government Entities Business Operating Division.
Upon initial review of LaSalle Family Foundation’s most recent IRS tax filing, Starin said, “It doesn’t pass the smell test for what I would expect a private foundation to be operating.”
An ICE spokesperson emailed in response to an inquiry from Impactivize, but did not address questions about the nonprofit status of LaSalle Family Foundation. ICE spokesperson wrote: “Allegations ICE has plans to open a detention facility at England Airpark are false. England Airpark is a staging facility for deportations. A staging facility is where illegal aliens await their deportation flight to their destination country or transfer to a detention facility.”
Children’s Rights, a legal nonprofit, said in a LinkedIn post about the new facility: “Despite ICE statements that children would only be held for a few days at most, the facility could become a prison where children languish for weeks or months without oversight.”
“It’s an expansion of the deportation system in ways we haven’t seen before,” Leecia Welch, chief legal counsel at Children’s Rights, told AP. “There’s just so much that could go wrong with this facility.”
Speaking to The Guardian in March about the new facility, England Airpark executive director Hennessy described the Guardian’s previous reporting on detention operations at the Alexandria, Louisiana, airport as “full of crap.” Hennessy “also dismissed concerns relayed in the reporting over poor medical care and a spate of emergencies including suicide attempts.
“Some migrants detained in Alexandria ‘don’t want to go home,’ Hennessy said. ‘They’d rather stay here in the United States being fat, dumb and happy and living off … our federal government.'”
Who is really living off our federal government
“Private prisons introduce the profit motive into the equation,” says Katherine Hawkins, a senior legal analyst at the Project on Government Oversight, a watchdog group, NPR reported last month.
About the England Airpark Authority’s motivations, The Guardian reported: “The [Airpark] authority would be paid more than $535,000 in annual rent with funding from the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which the Trump administration championed and which has designated more than $170bn for immigration enforcement activities. The commissioners voted the proposal through almost unanimously.”
As for questions about the tax-exempt status of the LaSalle Family Foundation, Starin said, “For this type of activity, I would typically see the first line of regulation being the attorney general’s office of the state. Because one of the roles of every attorney general is to ensure that gifts, endowments, and bequests are used for the purposes for which they were given, and that the fiduciary responsibilities of those that are in charge of those gifts are being followed. Almost every state has criminal laws that associate with fiduciary responsibilities.”
A spokesperson for Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill responded to an inquiry from Impactivize in a text message: “Nah, reach out to ICE / DHS. The AG fully supports the brave men and women of ICE.”
But neither the Louisiana AG’s office nor the ICE spokesperson addressed questions from Impactivize about the nonprofit status of LaSalle Family Foundation, ICE contractor for the new facility. It is not clear how operating the England Airpark ICE facility fits the foundation’s statement to the IRS about its “charitable activities.” LaSalle Family Foundation reported its “charitable activities” on its most recent IRS tax filing:
“Programs are conducted on a regular basis within correctional facilities designed to provide education and tools to prepare the incarcerated person to reenter life outside the prison. Chaplains are employed to plan and conduct the programs offering conseling [sic] and guidance.”
About the clause “Chaplains are employed,” Starin said, “It’s also interesting because it says they’re employed, but it says that they have no employees.”
About LaSalle Corrections
LaSalle Corrections runs private prisons and federal immigration detention centers throughout the South and has come under congressional scrutiny for its relationship with ICE. Last year, Senator Dick Durbin (D-Illinois), Ranking Member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, wrote a letter to Rodney Cooper, then-executive director of LaSalle Corrections. (Cooper was killed in a plane crash later that year.) Durbin wrote:
“LaSalle Corrections has been identified as a key partner in ICE’s detention system, with the agency itself describing the company as ‘an important part’ of its detention operations. With the Trump Administration’s goal of deporting one million individuals in one year, the scale of private companies’ involvement and willingness to detain vulnerable populations, such as families, warrants congressional scrutiny.”
Last year, A federal jury awarded $42.75 million to the family of a Louisiana man who died behind bars at a jail operated by LaSalle Corrections.
Erie Moore Sr., a 57-year-old man died a decade ago while being held at Richwood Correctional Center, a Monroe, La., facility run by LaSalle. WFAA first detailed his story in 2020 as part of its Jailed to Death series, which examined deaths inside jails operated by LaSalle Corrections.
According to a 2020 report by the Center for International Human Rights of the Northwestern Pritzker School of Law, titled Report on the Role of Private Security Companies in Migrant Detention in the U.S. and their Impact on the Protection of the Rights of Migrants:
“LaSalle expanded its operations to include the detention of migrants following the 2016 election of President Donald Trump. At the time, domestic prison populations had begun to fall due to changes in the law aimed at reducing mass incarceration, threatening revenues for private prison companies like LaSalle. Hearing the new president’s rhetoric on immigration, LaSalle’s co-founder, Billy McConnell, reportedly saw a fortuitous new opportunity for his company in the detention of migrants.”
In 2019, USA Today published an investigation of private prisons. When “President Donald Trump swept into office, promising to crack down on immigrants. McConnell saw his next opportunity: the business of immigration detention. LaSalle Corrections quickly opened six more facilities in Louisiana. His detention centers hold more than 7,000 immigration detainees.
“’What somebody else thinks about Billy McConnell compared with what God thinks of Billy McConnell is almost irrelevant,’ he said, noting that he carries a crucifix at all times and ministers to detainees locked inside detention centers. ‘We don’t arrest ’em. We don’t try ’em. I know what the laws on the books say, and I’m a guy who goes by the rules.'”
William K. McConnell is listed as the Director of the LaSalle Family Foundation on its IRS tax filing.
How LaSalle Family Foundation became England Airpark ICE facility contractor
Compass Connections, a Texas-based nonprofit, was originally slated to run the England Airpark ICE facility with LaSalle Family Foundation. But Compass Connections is no longer involved, AP reported, saying Compass Connections CEO Sonya Thompson did not elaborate.
Senator Ron Wyden (D-Oregon), Ranking Member of the Senate Finance Committee wrote a letter last month to Thompson about the new ICE facility, saying:
“Compass Connections and the LaSalle Family Foundation have been reported to be the entities expected to operate the facility,” and Compass “has received more than $38 million in federal funding under one ORR [Office of Refugee Resettlement] cooperative agreement in fiscal year 2026 alone, and more than $1.6 billion in federal funding for unaccompanied children’s care in the last three years.”
Compass Connections’ IRS tax filing shows Board Chair Kevin Dinnin was paid $1.7 million in reportable compensation from related organizations in 2024.
Now that Compass Connections is reportedly no longer involved in the England Airpark ICE facility project, tax-exempt LaSalle Family Foundation is apparently the sole ICE contractor tasked with operating the facility.
LaSalle Corrections itself will be involved in operating the holding facility and ensuring compliance, the company’s chief financial officer, Tim Kurpiewski, wrote in an email reviewed by the AP. How LaSalle Family Foundation, the official ICE contractor for the facility, will deploy its charitable services is unknown.
It is also unknown why Compass Connections is no longer involved in the Airpark facility, following Sen. Wyden’s letter to the organization’s CEO. A representative at Compass Connections directed Impactivize to call the U.S Department of Health and Human Services with any questions. The HHS office of Administration for Children and Families responded to an email inquiry: “We refer you to our colleagues at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) for all ICE-related questions.”
Sen. Wyden wrote a letter last month to HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., sounding alarms over deportation of kids. Sen. Wyden wrote: “I have obtained credible information that the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS or Department) is utilizing a list of over 500 unaccompanied children currently in the care and custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) as targets for expedited removal under an unprecedented legal framework. The lack of transparency surrounding the deployment of this new framework is deeply alarming, as is the Department’s continued efforts to unilaterally send children back to dangerous conditions in their countries of origin, potentially including Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, and Afghanistan.”
That LaSalle Corrections’ nonprofit arm LaSalle Family Foundation is assigned to run the Airpark facility for kids should sound even louder alarm bells.
The ICE – Private Prison Company Revolving Door
LaSalle spokesperson Scott Sutterfield declined to comment about the new ICE facility at England Airpark, AP reported. But Mother Jones reported about Scott Sutterfield in 2019: “ICE’s Revolving Door: Top Official Goes to Work for Private Prison Company: The head of ICE’s largest regional office now works for a troubled company awarded big contracts in his jurisdiction.” Mother Jones reported:
“Since September [2019], Sutterfield has been a development executive for LaSalle Corrections, where he is responsible for creating business opportunities for a family-run company whose most important client is his former employer. LaSalle has a thoroughly documented history of negligence leading to the deaths of inmates in its custody.” And: “His move to LaSalle is among the most egregious examples in a pattern of senior ICE officials taking jobs at the detention companies they were once tasked with holding accountable.”
Wesley McConnell, listed as President of the LaSalle Family Foundation on its tax filing, responded to an inquiry from Impactivize in an email, saying he forwarded the inquiry to Scott, “our media correspondent.” Scott did not respond.
The ICE revolving door swivels in both directions. The current acting director of ICE David Venturella was previously an executive at the GEO Group (NYSE: GEO), the largest private prison provider for ICE. Senator Elizabeth Warren wrote in a letter to Venturella in May: “Your career can be characterized as a continuous, decades-long trip in and out of the revolving door between ICE and the private prison industry.”
NPR reported last month: “After Trump took office again last year, GEO Group and other private prison companies such as CoreCivic raced to meet the government’s demand for more detention beds, including re-opening long vacant former prisons.
“It has paid off: In 2025, GEO Group made more than $250 million in profit, a nearly 700% increase from the previous year.
“’Last year was the most successful period for new business wins in our company’s history, and we expect 2026 to be a very active year as well,’ GEO Group CEO George Zoley said on the company’s most recent earnings call in May,” reported NPR.
Pressure on institutional money managers to divest from publicly traded GEO Group has intensified. The Los Angeles Dodgers ownership group has divested from GEO, as has the state of New Jersey public worker pension fund.
Calls to divest from ICE private prison providers have targeted the largest money management firms in the world. A project called “Drop Vanguard” says: “The Vanguard Group is one of the nation’s leading retirement plan providers. It is also one of the largest shareholders in both GEO Group and CoreCivic (NYSE: CXW), major private prison corporations profiting off immigrant surveillance, detention, and deportation.”
Citizens Bank is facing boycotts for doing business with ICE private prison companies. Banking Dive reported: “Citizens Financial Group is facing pushback from shareholders, customers and activists who want the bank to cut ties with federal immigration detention center operators.”
Several retail banks had announced they wouldn’t do business with private prison companies. The Intercept reported in February saying some retail banks had disconnected from the private prison industry, JPMorgan Chase among them. Asked by Impactivize whether JPMorgan Chase could confirm it is no longer doing business with private prison companies, a JPM Chase spokesperson emailed, ambiguously: “We have nothing to add.”
About ICE and kids in detention facilities
Once the ICE-private prison system is examined through the lens of “profit motive,” detaining immigrants – especially kids – is a sickening proposition.
The Marshall Project reported last month that ICE “has detained over 6,200 children during President Donald Trump’s second term, and in Trump’s annual budget request to Congress, “his administration requested funding for ‘up to 30,000 family unit beds.’ Congress ultimately holds the power to enact or reject that budget, but it signals the administration’s goals for continuing family detention.”
The New York Times reported earlier this month:
“ICE officials were told that the White House wanted an increase in arrests, according to three officials with knowledge of the conversations. One of the officials said that it was unclear how long the pace could continue, but that ICE officials had been told that 2,000 arrests a day was the new standard for enforcement.”
And, in response to the shooting death of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in Houston, Texas on Tuesday, Carly Pérez Fernández, Communications Director at Detention Watch Network, issued the following statement:
“The evidence against ICE is indisputable. ICE kills people and threatens community safety across the country. No one is safe when ICE is present – whether on the streets or in one of the agency’s more than 200 abuse-ridden detention facilities.
IRS Whistleblower Award Program
It’s not clear how services rendered by the nonprofit LaSalle Family Foundation, the official ICE contractor to run the new facility at England Airpark, are differentiated from LaSalle Corrections’ for-profit business.
Attorney Starin said anyone can flag questions about tax-exempt LaSalle Family Foundation to the IRS, and pointed Impactivize to the IRS Whistleblower Program, available to the public. He said of the program, “This is relatively new. It’s always been the case that you could try to get a whistleblower award, but it’s never been so blatantly put out there that, ‘hey, there’s a reason for you to report these people.’”
The IRS says: “We need help from whistleblowers—people with firsthand knowledge of non-compliance who are willing to share what they know with us so we can investigate it when warranted.”
Asked whether the IRS is beholden to the Trump administration, Starin said, “It isn’t.” He added that IRS employees “get instructions from the Trump administration from time to time, and they flatly ignore them.” Starin told Impactivize that no matter who the IRS commissioner is, “they can’t make the employees do what the administration says, because there’s a law that says that if an employee knows that the instruction is coming from the president, that they have to ignore it – or they face criminal repercussions.” He added, “If IRS employees facilitate anyone from the office of the White House…then they are committing a crime. And so they have cover effectively to ignore” instructions from the White House.
The IRS says on its website: “If you have information about suspected tax fraud, evasion or tax law violation the IRS is authorized to administer, enforce or investigate, you may be eligible to submit a claim for a monetary award with the IRS Whistleblower Office. “A whistleblower award is generally 15–30% of the amount we collect because of the information in your claim.”
Anyone can submit a whistleblower report here.
Selectable options include “Tax-exempt organization,” and “Tax law violations by these entities can include:”
- Fraud
- Lack of charitable or exempt purpose
- Illegal activities
- For-profit business activities
Anyone can ask the IRS if the tax-exempt LaSalle Family Foundation “doesn’t pass the smell test.”
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