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Hey, guys—regular readers of the newsletter know that I often write about the infamous Louisiana ICE detention system. One thing advocates, legal experts, and Democrats have grappled with is: how do we bring more attention to what the administration is doing when they ship folks to an inaccessible place, a place where it is difficult for family and lawyers to find and meet with detained people? This issue of Huddled Masses is about a major effort to do just that.
-Adrian
Exclusive: The Next Move to Take on Trump’s Notorious Detention Centers
A coalition of labor and civil rights groups are organizing to protest multiple Louisiana detention centers.
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A COALITION OF LABOR AND CIVIL RIGHTS groups are coming together to draw attention to one of the more controversial components of Donald Trump’s mass deportation efforts: the use of notorious immigration detention centers in Louisiana.
Beginning Friday, the Justice Journey, led by the SEIU in conjunction with the ACLU and NAACP, will mobilize hundreds of union members from different industries and across the country to journey by bus to Louisiana. Once there, they will protest at multiple detention centers in the coming days, organizers told The Bulwark exclusively.
The union members assembling will come from California, Illinois, the New York area, North Carolina, and South Carolina. Stops along the route will include El Paso, where they’ll meet with border and immigrant service organizations and local elected officials, Houston for a civil rights roundtable with faith leaders, a visit to the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, and to Selma for the Emmett Till memorial in Alabama.
On Tuesday, more than 500 workers and allies will join a culminating rally at Lafayette Park in New Orleans to demand an end to ICE raids terrorizing cities and communities and the release of people unjustly detained. The number could be far higher, organizers said, because local protests have received hundreds of participants on their own.
The campaign is among the most aggressive yet from these groups to try and draw attention to—and gin up opposition towards—Trump’s deportation regime. And it’s not without risk. Trump officials have telegraphed that they want to crack down on those people protesting ICE operations, whether they be immigrants, U.S. citizens, or even elected officials.
But the sprawling effort is still being cheered on by organizers as evidence that the administration’s pushback is not deterring opponents.
“The Justice Journey culminates a dream I’ve been having of ‘How do I make people care?’ This is so horrible! Why don’t people care?” Nora Ahmed, the legal director for the ACLU in Louisiana, told me. Ahmed noted that she has been on the ground for three years visiting Louisiana’s ICE detention centers, which are notorious for human rights abuses, to understand the challenging landscape advocates face.
Activists stress that the ICE archipelago in the Bayou State, which includes nine detention centers, was condemnable before Trump took power again. The Alexandria Staging Facility, for example, is the only one in the nation that has an airport attached to it, Ahmed said. That helps concentrate detentions in a location that is not only notoriously difficult to reach, but is also viewed as a “black hole” because it does not allow attorney client meetings or even teleconferences or written communication between lawyers and detainees.
SEIU leadership decided to oppose the administration’s immigration agenda at the outset of Trump’s second term, Justice Journey organizers said. But the fight came to the union in a darker, more direct way when the administration began to detain its members. Rümeysa Öztürk, the Tufts University student who was rushed by Boston ICE agents and thrown in a van in a viral video, is a member of SEIU Local 509. Other union-affiliated officials who were detained include Lewelyn Dixon (Local 925) from Washington State, Cliona Ward (Local 2015) from California, and David Huerta, the president of SEIU California.
A goal of the Justice Journey is to express that immigrants and Hispanic communities are not the only ones suffering from Trump’s mass deportations, but that the labor movement and those it represents are also being harmed. Its use of bus rides and its stops in Memphis and Selma are designed to place the campaign in the context of the Civil Rights movement of the ’50s and ’60s.
“The Justice Journey is more than bus rides. It’s a declaration from workers everywhere—not just immigrant workers, not just workers of color, but all workers—that we’re not going to sit idly by while the administration assaults us with terroristic raids,” SEIU President April Verrett told The Bulwark. As a black woman, she said, she connected the fight for dignity for detained immigrants to Native Americans’ historic struggle for rights and recognition and African Americans’ long quest for full citizenship, civil rights, and social equality from slavery through Jim Crow.
“The soil in some places in the South is red—red with the blood of my ancestors,” she said. “The fact that they choose to house immigrants in the American South—if it wasn't so sick and twisted, it would be poetic.”
Tahtebah Gonzalez, 27, an African American and Puerto Rican leader from Atlanta with the Union of Southern Service Workers, who is taking part in the protest, agreed. He said he learned the importance of standing with others when he and his coworkers went on strike at Dunkin’ Donuts during one of the busiest weekends of the year in 2023.
“When I first had a fight for better rights, other workers with different jobs who didn’t know us stood behind us, had our back, and made a difference, giving us the wind we needed,” he said. “I think it’s our job as people and community to come together and stand in solidarity when that kind of injustice [against immigrants] is taking place.”
The Justice Journey won’t just be made up of national groups. Faith leaders and local community organizations will be part of the efforts in Louisiana as well.
Tania Wolf, with the SouthEast Dignity Not Detention Coalition based in New Orleans, said her coalition is active in Louisiana, Arkansas, Tennessee, Mississippi, and Alabama and is united in its commitment to ending detentions in the jurisdiction of the New Orleans ICE field office. She underscored the importance of bringing attention to the detention centers in Louisiana when people would rather look away.
“What’s happening here doesn’t stop for the summer,” she told me. “The fight for immigrant justice is a serious, urgent issue—the struggle to show the dignity of immigrant community members, specifically how immigration law is being used as a weapon of this authoritarian regime. We’re taking collective action to show bridges of solidarity, because we can’t win this alone. We need to document what’s happening to show those detained immigrants that they’re not alone.”