Exclusive: Top Senate Dem Responds to Christian Faith Group’s Plea for Oversight of New ICE Facility for Kids
Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR), Ranking Member of the Senate Finance Committee, has responded to a Christian faith group that urged him to exercise oversight of a private prison company set to run a new planned ICE facility for families and unaccompanied children at an airport in Louisiana.
Faithful America, a progressive Christian faith group based in Washington, D.C., sent a letter to Sen. Wyden on July 31, signed by 20,000 of its members, requesting oversight of a new 528-bed ICE (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement) facility for families and kids planned to open at England Airpark in Alexandria, Louisiana.
The facility is set to be run by the “nonprofit arm” of private prison company LaSalle Corrections, AP reported last month. Two detainees have died since April at another LaSalle-run facility in Louisiana.
READ: A private prison company will run new ICE children’s facility–and IRS pros have questions
In its letter to Sen. Wyden, Faithful America cited previous reporting from Impactivize, which raised questions about LaSalle Corrections and its tax-exempt entity, LaSalle Family Foundation – the ICE contractor set to run the facility. Faithful America wrote:
”The ICE facility being proposed at England Air Park in Alexandria, Louisiana, to imprison 528 migrant children may not pass the IRS ‘smell test.’
“That is the conclusion of a tax attorney who spent 13 years at the IRS as a subject-matter expert on tax-exempt organizations, after reviewing the most recent IRS filing of the LaSalle Family Foundation – the entity now under federal contract to operate this facility.”
The group’s letter to Sen. Wyden went on to say: “We write now to demand actual accountability over ICE. This is not something we can write off as solely a financial issue. LaSalle Corrections has a documented history of detainee deaths and abusive behavior.
“Children are the last of innocents to be thrown into their cruel hands.”
Sen. Wyden responded to the group’s letter in an email message last week:
“Since the day he took office Donald Trump has been going out of his way to endanger migrant children and leave them at risk of falling into horrific cycles of trafficking and other abuse,” Wyden said. “I’m extremely concerned that the new ICE detention facility planned for construction in Louisiana will be another black box location for the Trump administration to disappear migrant children with no oversight and no accountability. As a leading voice in Congress conducting oversight into Trump’s treatment of unaccompanied children, I will continue using every tool at my disposal to spotlight these abuses and fight for accountability, and will closely watchdog this new proposed facility.”
Photo use with permission of photographer
Last year, Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL), Ranking Member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, wrote a letter to Rodney Cooper, then-executive director of LaSalle Corrections. 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.”
Cooper was killed in a small plane crash later that year.
A spokesperson for Sen. Durbin messaged Impactivize last week, saying, “LaSalle hasn’t provided substantive answers to Sen. Durbin’s inquiries. Prior to the ED’s passing, staff had had one call with the CEO which yielded no useful information.”
Follow the Money
Compass Connections, a Texas-based nonprofit, was originally slated to run the ICE facility at England Airpark along with LaSalle Family Foundation. But Compass Connections is no longer involved with the facility, AP reported.
Sen. Wyden wrote a letter in June to Compass Connections CEO Sonya 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 did not elaborate on why it is no longer involved in the project. A representative from the nonprofit directed Impactivize to contact DHS with any questions.
Faithful America wrote in its letter to Sen. Wyden: “We recognize you have already begun to investigate and take action. Your letters to Compass Connections (now no longer involved with the facility), and to HHS Secretary Kennedy over the deportations of children, are a good start.”
Now that Compass Connections is no longer involved, LaSalle Corrections’ nonprofit arm seems to be the primary contractor set to run the ICE facility at England Airpark.
Photo used with permission of photographer.
LaSalle Corrections is a family-owned private prison company that is running an “accountability shell game,” according to a recent investigative exposé by Hunterbrook Media. “A monthslong Hunterbrook Media investigation reveals this secretive family has built a liability moat — a sprawling multimillion-dollar private prison enterprise hidden behind nearly 80 opaque LLCs that we could identify.”
Questions still loom about LaSalle’s nonprofit arm. In its letter to Sen. Wyden, Faithful America noted that a former attorney with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) Tax-Exempt Division said the LaSalle Family Foundation’s tax filing “doesn’t pass the smell test,” citing previous reporting by Impactivize.
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 IRS 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.”
The American Prospect reported last month, “A spokesperson for the [England Airpark] authority did not respond to a request for comment, including whether board members are concerned that LaSalle Corrections is attempting to evade taxes by using its foundation to run the camp.”
As for what regulatory body would usually field questions about tax-exempt entity 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.”
But a spokesperson for Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill responded to an inquiry from Impactivize in a text message last month: “Nah, reach out to ICE / DHS. The AG fully supports the brave men and women of ICE.”
An ICE spokesperson emailed in response to an inquiry from Impactivize last month, but did not address questions about LaSalle’s nonprofit arm. Instead, ICE was concerned primarily with semantics: the ICE spokesperson denied that the facility at England Airpark is a “detention” facility and said it should be called a “staging” facility.
The ICE spokesperson messaged: “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.”
But the original five-year agreement between ICE and the England Airpark Authority from July 2025, viewed by Impactivize, said: “The service provider shall provide detention services for detained aliens.”
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.”
ICE For-Profit Machine
Contractors are eager to get their slice of the ICE pie. “The House Appropriations Committee just approved an additional $28 billion for ICE and CBP for fiscal year 2027, which starts this fall. That would push available funds over $200 billion,” the Brennan Center reported in June.
As Mother Jones reported earlier this month: “‘The Trump administration opened the floodgates for these predatory companies to come in and profit off of detaining human beings,’ said Jennifer Ibañez Whitlock, senior policy counsel with the National Immigration Law Center. She noted that beyond aviation and private prison companies, firms are profiting by providing food, laundry, and varied other services to the tens of thousands of people in ICE confinement every day. ‘There is so much money right now in detaining people,’ she said.”
And LaSalle is apparently not the only contractor set to reap financial rewards from the new planned ICE facility in Louisiana. A recruiting event to staff the new ICE facility at England Airpark took place over the weekend in Alexandria, hosted by Anovaeon LLC, a Texas-based company, which describes its services as “humanitarian response.” Anovaeon posted the recruiting event for the new ICE facility on LinkedIn, saying “Anovaeon is excited to host a two-day community hiring event at the Alexandria Family Staging Center.”
Anovaeon was one of seven firms awarded a small business seat on a U.S. Navy program for a 10-year contract last year, as announced by the Department of Defense (informally called the Department of War). The small businesses “are being awarded a $10,000,000,000 multiple award,” the announcement said, and “If the option period is exercised, the total estimated contract maximum for each contractor could be up to $20,000,000,000,000.”
Project Salt Box reported in March about Anovaeon staffing a planned immigration detention Center in Maryland. “Anovaeon LLC, which has never won a federal contract, is recruiting for a 1,500-bed facility outside Hagerstown amid unresolved infrastructure concerns,” reported Project Salt Box.
LaSalle Corrections also posted an announcement of Anovaeon’s recruiting event on its Facebook page last week. But Anovaeon’s agreement with LaSalle is unknown.
Anovaeon President and CEO Eric Fritz responded to an inquiry from Impactivize on LinkedIn: “I appreciate your persistence, and greatly respect the journalistic duty to find the truth, but we won’t be engaging with media on anything right now.”
Fritz posted a comment on LinkedIn last year, saying: “I’m living my professional dream and imagining my own future. But there’s also the ever-present worry – will it keep working? Guess I’ll just have to find out whenever that day comes…”
Wesley McConnell, listed as President of the LaSalle Family Foundation on its tax filing and co-owner of LaSalle Corrections on LinkedIn, responded to an inquiry from Impactivize last month in an email, saying he forwarded an inquiry to Scott Sutterfield, “our media correspondent.” Sutterfield has not responded to inquiries.
Mother Jones reported about 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.”
Public Pressure Keeps Escalating
Community members have packed board meetings of the England Airpark Authority, urging board members to cancel their contract for the ICE facility for kids. The next scheduled Board meeting is August 27.
Erin Tracy is founder of CENLA Activism, a grassroots group launched on Facebook that is leading coalition partners to protest the new ICE facility. Tracy told Impactivize in an interview, “There’s absolutely nothing that they could do that would make opening this facility okay.”
The ACLU of Louisiana and the National Immigration Project were among 13 organizations that signed an open letter last month urging the England Airpark Board to reconsider its February decision “authorizing the England Airpark Executive Director to execute new contracts with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the LaSalle Family Foundation, an affiliate of LaSalle Corrections.” The letter went on to say: “We urge you to rescind your prior approval and cancel these contracts before irreversible harm is done.”
Tracy said, “They made this a humanitarian thing, pitched Compass Connections, which is now gone. And they are trying to replace them [with Anovaeon] and make the same claims for care,” she said. “But from the coalition’s perspective, nothing is acceptable. No level of care makes detaining these children acceptable. So for us, it is, unequivocally, cancel it. Period.”
Community members, led by CENLA Activism, are again planning to pack the England Airpark Board meeting in Alexandria on August 27. The group has issued a public call to action, which includes online options for those who are not local.
Photo use with permission of photographer.
Rev. Dr. Shannon Fleck, Executive Director of Faithful America, has visited the England Airpark site. She responded to Sen. Wyden’s statement in an email to Impactivize:
“I have seen the evils of England Airpark firsthand. Deportation flights operate in and out of that decommissioned Air Force base around the clock, hauling people ICE has snatched from their homes and communities. Now, they want to use the same facility to house children.” She added:
“We are grateful and heartened by Senator Wyden’s response, and by his recognition of the serious concerns surrounding the care and treatment of migrant children. We deeply appreciate his commitment to using his position to demand transparency and accountability.
“We applaud Senator Wyden’s leadership, and urge his colleagues to join him in speaking out against this cruel project, which threatens to further traumatize and disappear vulnerable children and families.”
No one from LaSalle Corrections, LaSalle Family Foundation, or England Airpark Authority has responded to inquiries from Impactivize as of this writing.
Full text of Faithful America’s July 31 letter to Senator Wyden:
Dear Senator Wyden,
The ICE facility being proposed at England Air Park in Alexandria, Louisiana, to imprison 528 migrant children may not pass the IRS “smell test.”
That is the conclusion of a tax attorney who spent 13 years at the IRS as a subject-matter expert on tax-exempt organizations, after reviewing the most recent IRS filing of the LaSalle Family Foundation – the entity now under federal contract to operate this facility. He put it plainly:
“It doesn’t pass the smell test for what I would expect a private foundation to be operating.”
We, as Faithful America – an online home for grassroots Christians and their allies, including many in Oregon – believe that these allegations demand your Committee’s immediate attention.
We recognize you have already begun to investigate and take action. Your letters to Compass Connections (now no longer involved with the facility), and to HHS Secretary Kennedy over the deportations of children, are a good start.
We write now to demand actual accountability over ICE. This is not something we can write off as solely a financial issue. LaSalle Corrections has a documented history of detainee deaths and abusive behavior.
Children are the last of innocents to be thrown into their cruel hands.
You have the power to halt this facility in its tracks by demanding a full accounting of its records and finances. A facility set to hold children should be held to the highest standards.
Thank you for the oversight you have already shown on behalf of these children. We ask you to carry it one step further.
Sincerely,
Faithful America and 20,000 of our concerned Members
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