New ICE Facility for Migrant Children Raises Alarm Over Trafficking Risks

A new ICE (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement) facility for unaccompanied children, families, and single women is set to open within an airport in Louisiana in order to speed deportations – raising concerns about risks of child trafficking. 

The new ICE facility in Alexandria will be at the England Airpark, overseen by the airpark authority board. The New York Times reported last year: “How Louisiana Built Trump’s Busiest Deportation Hub: ICE wants to make immigration enforcement as efficient as FedEx or Amazon. Louisiana was poised for this moment.”

While officials are focusing on sanitizing optics of the new Alexandria ICE facility – emphasizing it will be a “staging” facility for immigrants who are voluntarily self-deporting – a top Democratic senator has raised concerns about risks of child trafficking posed to unaccompanied minors who ICE plans to hold and deport from what it is calling the “Alexandria Family Staging Center.”

Senator Ron Wyden (D-Oregon), Ranking Member of the U.S. Senate Finance Committee, messaged a response to a faith group’s letter to him, with 20,000 signatures, urging oversight of the Alexandria ICE facility. Wyden said in a statement in August, as the Queen Zone first reported: 

“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.”

Congressman Troy Carter of Louisiana’s Second District told the Queen Zone in a statement: “I agree with Senator Wyden’s concerns.

“When the federal government assumes custody of a child, it also assumes responsibility for that child’s health, safety, and well-being. We’ve seen too many examples of how the Trump administration’s secrecy around migrant detention processes leaves families and the public in the dark about the location and general welfare of detainees. Without transparency and accountability, we have no assurance that these children will be safe.

“Unlike my Republican colleagues, I will remain relentless in my fight as a Democratic member of Homeland Security to demand answers from this Administration, expose ICE’s detention practices through facility oversight, and protect the lives of migrant children,” Rep. Carter said.

Although the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) in the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services (HHS) is charged with oversight and care of unaccompanied minors, children who ICE plans to hold at and deport from the Alexandria facility will have accepted a “voluntary departure,” or they may have received a removal order, and therefore will be in ICE custody. Unaccompanied minors held at or deported from the Alexandria ICE facility will not be in ORR custody, according to a highly placed source.

Experts question how unaccompanied minors, some as young as two years old, and without access to attorneys, can make decisions about voluntary departure from the country. The Trump administration has gutted legal representation for unaccompanied migrant children. 

CNN was granted access inside an immigration court hearing last week where dozens of children facing deportation, some as young as three years old, appealed to stay in the United States. Many of them were facing the judge without an attorney representing them. CNN reported:

“Among the first to appear before the judge was a 13-year-old Honduran boy named Angel. He didn’t have an attorney.

“Asked whether there was a reason he couldn’t return to Honduras, Angel told the judge, ‘My mom and almost my entire family are here. It’s too dangerous to go back.’

“But that wasn’t enough for the judge, who told the boy he did not qualify for asylum. ‘Would you like to request voluntary departure, or should I issue a removal order?’ The judge asked.

“‘I don’t know,’ Angel replied before bursting into tears. He stared ahead stoically and continued to cry, eventually saying: ‘I have no one. I have nothing.’”

Advocates for children are horrified 

“The 4-year-olds don’t know where they are and what’s going on. They may understand that they’re talking to a judge, and the judge asked them their name, but that’s the extent of their understanding,” an advocate who works with unaccompanied children told CNN.

“I’ve never witnessed so many removals and to see it happen with children who are standing there completely alone,” the advocate said.

Trudy Taylor Smith, Senior Administrator of Policy and Advocacy, Children’s Defense Fund-Texas told the Queen Zone in a statement:

“ICE is already detaining children with their families at a facility in Dilley, Texas where there has been documented abuse and neglect, and children are subjected to inhumane, dangerous conditions. The unaccompanied children whom ICE detains at the new child and family detention center in Alexandria, Louisiana, are at risk of experiencing these same harms,” Smith said. 

“Furthermore, the focus on rapid deportation from the Alexandria facility and the lack of access to legal representation for children detained there mean they are at risk of being sent to countries where they face grave danger and may even be returned to their traffickers.

“Legal representation is vital to protecting unaccompanied children from trafficking,” Smith said. “Congress has long recognized this, which is why the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act requires the federal government to ensure ‘to the greatest extent possible’ that unaccompanied children are provided with lawyers to represent them in their immigration cases.”

63 congressional representatives signed a letter last week to HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. demanding that legal representation be restored for unaccompanied migrant minors. ABC News reported that “lawmakers raised concerns over the government’s efforts to award new federal contracts to politically connected firms that they say lack immigration experience.

“The 63 lawmakers wrote that they are ‘gravely concerned that ORR would entrust a vulnerable population with firms so plainly unqualified for the task.’”

But the unaccompanied migrant children set to arrive at the Alexandria ICE facility will reportedly not be in custody of ORR, but rather, they will be in custody of ICE. 

An ORR spokesperson referred the Queen Zone to DHS (U.S. Department of Homeland Security) or ICE for questions about unaccompanied minors at the Alexandria facility.

An ICE spokesperson messaged the Queen Zone, but didn’t respond to questions about unaccompanied minors, saying only: “The Alexandria Family Staging Center 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.”

In July, a Pittsburgh nonprofit organization filed a lawsuit against DHS and Secretary Markwayne Mullin on behalf of unaccompanied migrant children who are put at risk of trafficking.

“The United States has long recognized a compelling interest in protecting children from harm and trafficking, an interest Congress has codified and reaffirmed for more than three decades,” the complaint reads. “Immigration authorities, and immigration courts, throughout the United States are now refusing to afford children the due process to seek that protection.”

ICE is “disappearing” immigrants

Sen. Wyden’s concerns about the Alexandria facility as “another black box location for the Trump administration to disappear migrant children” have taken on new gravity with advancement of the administration’s new procedures that effectively “disappear” immigrants.

The Trump administration has changed its policies to “disappear” immigrants from its locator system. As the Washington Post reported last week: “U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is erasing immigrants with final deportation orders from a searchable online database, leaving families and attorneys in the dark as they try to find out where someone has been taken.”

The Trump administration has also continued to weaken policies and procedures to protect unaccompanied migrant kids from trafficking. As the Associated Press reported last week: “Change in human trafficking policy could make some minors easier to deport.”

Sen. Wyden told the AP that the change requires children and their advocates to report human trafficking to the same agency that is holding them in custody. “This move to sideline human trafficking experts is more evidence that the Trump administration will deport kids to score political points rather than actually protect them,” he said.

On Wednesday, Sen. Wyden launched a probe into HHS demanding answers about the new policy “that puts deportation priorities ahead of child safety by ending direct reporting of child trafficking to specialists.” 

In a letter to HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Assistant Secretary for Family Support at the Administration for Children & Families Alex J. Adams, Wyden demanded answers, writing: 

“The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS or Department) continues to dismantle its capacity to identify, respond to, and prevent trafficking and exploitation of children in its custody, particularly unaccompanied children referred to the Administration for Children & Families’ (ACF) Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR).”

In April, Wyden raised the alarm about dramatic reductions in trafficking related determinations, following staffing reductions and other changes by the Trump administration. Wyden has continued to spotlight how the Trump administration has undermined the care and treatment of unaccompanied children to serve its anti-immigrant deportation agenda rather than fulfill the statutorily required child welfare responsibilities Congress assigned to HHS.

Epstein Files, Child Trafficking, Follow the Money 

Alarm bells about risks of child trafficking have become deafening, as public pressure to release the full (Jeffrey) Epstein files has reached a crescendo.

On Wednesday, Sen. Wyden demanded the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) release an Epstein investigation document that has been “illegally concealed,” he said, thus blocking investigation of at least $1.4 billion worth of Epstein’s suspicious financial transactions. 

In a letter to U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche and FBI Director Kash Patel, Wyden wrote: 

“By looking the other way for decades, the banks allowed Epstein to have ready and reliable access to cash necessary to recruit, harbor and transport young women and underage girls for the purpose of human trafficking and sexual abuse,” Wyden wrote to Blanche and Patel.

Activists on the ground at the Alexandria ICE facility have also invoked Epstein in their protests. Community members and faith leaders in Alexandria have been calling for cancellation of the new ICE facility, citing risks of child trafficking. 

Erin Tracy is founder of CENLA Activism, a grassroots group launched on Facebook that is leading coalition partners to protest the new ICE facility in Alexandria. She messaged the Queen Zone on Friday, saying: 

“We’ve got a president who’s no stranger to the Epstein files leading a Gestapo campaign to round up our most vulnerable population of children, driving profits off their lives. It’s human trafficking. These children are in the U.S. for survival, whether they made it here alone or were brought here by a loving family trying to protect them,” Tracy said. “But instead of protecting them, this administration ships them around, locks them up, and ships them again – lining the pockets of private airlines, for-profit prisons and ‘third countries,’ where they kick them off a plane or dump them off the back of a van like a battered Amazon package.”

The Supreme Court ruled last week allowing the Trump administration to continue rapid “third-country” deportations for now. It is not clear to what countries ICE plans to deport unaccompanied minors from the Alexandria facility.

Tracy said, “There’s absolutely nothing that they could do that would make opening this facility okay.”

ICE and Profit Motive

As for Tracy’s concerns about profits, ICE detentions are driving massive profits at the two largest for-profit prison companies in the U.S., Geo Group (NYSE: GEO) and CoreCivic (NYSE: CXW); the latter runs the notorious Dilley facility in Texas. 

“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, reported NPR.

The New York Times reported in August, revealing that a subsidiary of Geo Group donated to Trump’s PAC after ICE gave it $165 million a year in contracts. Geo Group and CoreCivic reported combined revenues of $1.4 billion in quarterly revenue for the second quarter. 

CREW reported in July on Trump’s transactions of prison stocks: “The total amount of stock bought and sold was between $281,029 and $990,000, split between two companies that have benefited massively from Trump administration policy: GEO Group and CoreCivic.”

As Mother Jones reported in August: 

“In this growing market, people facing deportation—whether they are detained in squalid camps, forcibly flown out of the country, or agree to leave under the threat of detention—are seen as commodities.

“‘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.”

The two corporations contracted to run the ICE facility in Alexandria are the LaSalle Family Foundation (the nonprofit arm of for-profit prison company LaSalle Corrections), and Anovaeon LLC. Detainees have died at other LaSalle-run facilities in the state, the most recent at Winn Correctional Facility.

Questions about LaSalle’s nonprofit arm have emerged. A former IRS attorney told the Queen Zone in July about LaSalle’s nonprofit arm: “Upon initial review of LaSalle Family Foundation’s most recent IRS tax filing, he said, ‘It doesn’t pass the smell test for what I would expect a private foundation to be operating.’”

The American Prospect reported: “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.”

A deep dive by Hunterbrook Media on LaSalle Corrections published in August revealed: “Today, ICE money is turbocharging LaSalle’s operations. Using complex intergovernmental service agreements, LaSalle partners with small-town sheriffs and rural municipalities to run multijurisdictional prisons that operate with little oversight.” 

The other operator of the Alexandria facility is Texas-based Anovaeon, LLC, a for-profit “humanitarian” firm, which joined the Alexandria ICE facility project after nonprofit Compass Connections dropped out for unknown reasons – and after Sen. Wyden sent a letter of inquiry to the Compass CEO. Anovaeon, which will be the care provider for kids, has been recruiting staff for the facility with ads on LinkedIn.

Last week, Anovaeon CEO Eric Fritz addressed the England Airpark Board of Directors. Parroting ICE talking points, Fritz said that the migrant family center at England Airpark is a staging center for those voluntarily leaving the U.S., reported Alexandria Town Talk, USA Today Network.

“This project over here is not a detention center,” Fritz emphasized. “It’s a staging center for families who are voluntarily departing this country admittedly through pretty [crappy] circumstances on their end. I acknowledge that.”

“Fritz said Anovaeon has nothing to hide. He handed out pamphlets and said he invited people to ‘meet our leader,’ referring to himself. He said people can reach out to him through the contact info listed on the website. ‘And that’s why I was out there today talking with people out front,’ he said. ‘I want them to know who we are. We have nothing to hide,’” reported Alexandria Town Talk.

On August 17, Fritz messaged me on LinkedIn in response to my inquiry: “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.”

Today, I asked Fritz about unaccompanied minors “voluntarily departing” from the Alexandria facility and risk of child trafficking, but I have not yet received a response.

The opening of the ICE Alexandria facility is part of the Trump administration’s larger orchestration of mass apprehension and deportation of unaccompanied minors – putting migrant kids at risk of trafficking, according to Sen. Wyden.

The Guardian reported this month: “Stephen Miller is leading an unprecedented and intense White House drive across a host of government departments to accelerate the removal of undocumented immigrant children from the US, using tactics that critics say are cruel and racist and, in some cases, flout federal law.”

Sen. Wyden told the Guardian: “Instead of protecting kids from human trafficking or helping them reunite with family, Trump and officials at HHS and DHS are violating children’s rights [and] flouting federal law to hit quotas and satisfy their ideological crusade against immigrants. The result is significant harm and trauma to innocent children.”

On a press call on Wednesday, representatives of advocacy groups opposing the new ICE detention and deportation facility in Alexandria, said the facility at England Airpark is due to open “any day now.” Community and clergy members on the ground in Alexandria are craning to look through facility fencing for the first unaccompanied kids to arrive, as DHS, ICE, and the England Airpark authority are not being transparent with their operations, activists say.

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