Mississippi’s ICE experience illustrates how race and geography determine who gets deported
In ‘detention alley,’ immigrants of color face the most ICE raids and the harshest courtroom outcomes
The specter of race is never far removed from America’s immigration system. Last week, President Donald Trump lowered the nation’s annual refugee cap from 125,000 to just 7,500, reserving most of those slots for white South Africans fleeing what he described as “political persecution.” It was the latest iteration of an immigration system that, since Trump’s inauguration, has favored whiteness and overtly targeted people of color.
Nowhere is that imbalanced system more visible than in Mississippi and Louisiana, where race and geography have converged to shape the harshest immigration outcomes in the country.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers have carried out more arrests of non-residents per capita in Mississippi than anywhere else, while Louisiana’s cluster of ICE detention centers serves as the nation’s primary immigrant holding cell. A huge chunk of all detained immigrants in the United States pass through a rural Southern corridor between Mississippi and Louisiana known by lawyers and activists as detention alley.
After immigrants are transported to these exclusively for-profit detention centers—hours from any major city—most are left to navigate a complex legal system with little or no representation. The facilities’ isolation, paired with some of the nation’s most conservative judges and hindrances promoted by White House policy, makes release or relief exceedingly rare.
It starts with ICE
The result is a system that punishes not only status but skin color and zip code, which in the South can be tantamount to a sentence of deportation. While the region has far fewer immigrants than other coastal states, the path through its immigration system appears to be far more punishing.
“It’s abundantly clear at this point that ICE carries out its mandate through racial profiling,” said Michelle LaPointe, the Georgia-based legal director of the American Immigration Council, a Washington D.C.-based advocacy group. “This happens all the time in smaller locales and places around the Southeast, but we don’t hear about it because ICE doesn’t make as many big, splashy, high-profile raids there.”
“But it’s only getting worse under this administration,” she added.
Mississippi has around 70,000 foreign-born residents, yet ICE officers in the state have been exceptionally aggressive in 2025, according to UCLA study of ICE arrests. Between February and June 2025, Mississippi recorded the nation’s highest per-capita rate of ICE arrests, at 21 arrests per 1,000 residents, compared with the next highest rate of 16 in West Virginia and less than one in Oregon (which is in last place).
That means a non-citizen in Mississippi is roughly 30 times more likely to be arrested than in Oregon.
According to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, its immigration agencies do not collect racial data, a bureaucratic omission that has allowed the agency to sidestep questions of bias, even as lawsuits and advocacy groups have claimed a clear pattern of racial targeting.
As to why ICE is arresting so many immigrants in Mississippi, LaPointe believes it’s connected to the high levels of cooperation between ICE and southern law enforcement.
“There are many state and local law-enforcement agencies in places like Mississippi and Louisiana willing to help ICE make arrests, more so than in other parts of the country,” LaPointe said. “That arrangement is a big part of the ongoing story of being an immigrant in the South.”
In Mississippi, where roughly 45 percent of the population is nonwhite, profiling has a long history. LaPointe notes that ICE officers routinely target people based on appearance, language and location, and claims they focus raids on industries dominated by immigrants of color.
This indiscriminate strategy of arrest, fueled by Homeland Security arrest quotas and a recent Supreme Court decision that broadened ICE’s authority to racially profile, has swept tens of thousands into detention. While the policy has been effective at executing Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda, it has eroded constitutional protections, with consequences that reach beyond the undocumented. A ProPublica investigation found that ICE agents arrested 170 U.S. citizens, most of whom were Hispanic in appearance, with some accused of forging their own proof of citizenship.
Though ICE arrests reveal that racial bias most visibly, the discrimination only deepens once those same immigrants enter detention facilities and the courts, where outcomes hinge on politics and discretion.
Rural detention, vanishing hope
For those caught in ICE’s dragnet, isolation in the Deep South’s array of private detention centers has become an effective deterrent to fighting back.
“The jails are in the middle of nowhere,” said Assma Ali, a nationally renowned immigration attorney based in Ridgeland, Mississippi. “Because of that, you’re limited in access to attorneys, especially in Mississippi.”
Nearly every immigrant detained in Mississippi is ultimately transferred to either Louisiana’s network of for-profit detention centers or to Mississippi’s Adams County Correctional Center in Natchez, the country’s largest immigration detention center. According to court documents (which represent one side of a legal argument), Cameroonian asylum seekers detained at the Adams County facility were allegedly tortured until they signed deportation papers waiving their right to hearings.
Inside these detention facilities, according to LaPointe, conditions are grim, with documented evidence of poor food, undrinkable water and scarce medical care. The result, LaPointe said, is a perfect storm that breaks people down psychologically and “discourages them from fighting their cases and makes it easier for the government to get them to self deport.”
In effect, ICE has built a system whose harshest impacts fall on those least able to fight back.
Between Mississippi and Louisiana, 20 facilities hold detainees, nine of which are dedicated detention centers run by GEO Group, CoreCivic or LaSalle Corrections. All are located within a few hours of Baton Rouge or New Orleans—the places with greater access to lawyers who might defend those held inside. The Adams County Detention facility is also located in a rural setting.
“I think ICE deliberately sends them to Mississippi and Louisiana to get them away from friendlier jurisdictions where they have greater access to counsel,” LaPointe said. “That’s why you’ll find people there from all over--New York, D.C., everywhere.”
LaPointe believes the strategy is both psychological and logistical. “If detainees don’t understand the law or their rights, they’re easier to coerce into self-deporting,” she said.
Once the detainees reach Louisiana, the need for legal help becomes acute. More than 80 percent of those sent to the South Louisiana ICE Processing Center in 2025 were deported, according to a Los Angeles Times analysis of detainee movements. A fifth of all deportations this year passed through the Alexandria Staging Facility in central Louisiana.
The location of where a detainee ends up can be extremely important.
Nearly 80 percent of immigrants who appear before a Louisiana immigration judge are detained, compared with just 30 percent nationally, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), a Syracuse University-based organization that collects immigration data.
In conservative states, the figures are uniformly high: 71 percent in Arizona, 63 percent in Georgia, 53 percent in Texas. In liberal states, it plunges to less than 5 percent in New York, New Jersey and Maryland, according to the data set.
Inside the facilities, the despair runs deep.
“Some are very, very depressed, like, very depressed,” noted Ali, who said she limits her detention caseload because of the emotional toll. “They look around and see everyone losing their cases. They become hopeless. They deteriorate.”
Access to counsel, which is far easier in major cities, collapses entirely in rural regions. Visits can take a full day of travel. Phone calls take days to arrange and usually last less than an hour, and detainees often have no access to their own evidence, LaPointe said.
Of the 9,954 pending immigration cases tied to Mississippi as of 2025, slightly more than half have no legal representation, according to TRAC. Nationwide, more than 85 percent of immigrants issued removal orders in 2025 had no lawyer at all, compared to 40 percent of new detainees in 2025 who had their cases dropped after securing a lawyer.
Representation, notes TRAC, is the single strongest factor determining whether an immigrant wins the right to stay. Yet fewer than 8 percent of detainees had a lawyer at their first court appearance in 2025.
The remoteness of the facilities does more than limit access to lawyers--it shapes the entire legal culture around them. Judges working in isolation, far from public scrutiny or media oversight, often absorb the same punitive assumptions that define the local law-enforcement culture. The result, attorneys say, is a convergence of ideology and location. Courts see more removals not just because detainees lack representation, but because the system itself encourages the denial of relief.
“I think the best way to describe it,” Ali said of southern immigration courts, “is that your chances of winning your case while in one of these places are extremely low, but it depends on what country you’re from.”
Nationally, Central American nationals, especially from Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, are detained at far higher rates than immigrants from South America, Asia or Europe, according to TRAC data. Mexicans are detained 57 percent of the time; Venezuelans and Brazilians, between 12 and 18 percent; Russians, Indians and Nigerians, between 5 and 17 percent.
Courts of unequal mercy
Once immigrants enter the court system, they are at the mercy of judicial discretion, which varies dramatically by region.
Reliable national data on immigration court outcomes is notoriously difficult to parse. ICE and the Executive Office for Immigration Review release information in inconsistent formats, often omitting hearing locations and case types, or conflating the location of detention facilities with the location of the court system it falls under. Some immigrants are recorded as having an address in the state they are being detained in rather than the state they were initially arrested.
However, asylum data, the most complete record of immigration decision made available, offers a clearer window into how regional bias shapes outcomes.
While nationwide asylum denials averaged 57.7 percent between 2019 and 2024, according to TRAC, Louisiana judges rejected nearly 97 percent of cases during that time. In Arlington, Texas, one judge denied more than 95 percent of cases. In San Francisco, by contrast, twelve judges granted asylum in more than 90 percent of cases, a stark illustration of how where an immigrant is arrested alone can determine their fate.
That imbalance intensifies at the appeal phase. The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, which reviews immigration rulings from Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas, denies asylum claims at roughly twice the rate of other circuits, reflecting a long-standing ideological tilt that reinforces the region’s already punitive system, according to a 2025 academic study, “Justice by Geography.”
“The precedent in the Fifth Circuit is very harsh,” Ali said. “I never ask for a nice judge. I only ask for a fair one. But fairness is getting harder to find.”
Ali described cases in which “even clients with visible injuries, psychological reports, and expert evidence are denied on credibility grounds.” Discretion, she said, “often comes down to which judge you get, and in the South, that discretion tends to lean one way.” She added: “I will tell you with 99 percent certainty, if they return, they will be harmed in their native country.”
A 2025 UCLA study showed that judges with enforcement backgrounds are far likelier to deny the asylum pattern amplified under Trump, who reshaped the Board of Immigration Appeals by elevating only judges with denial rates of more than 87 percent.
Trump’s policies extended that rigidity to the pretrial phase. An executive order signed in August 2025 sharply limited who could receive bond and applies to longtime residents with families and no criminal record.
Under the new rules, only those who entered legally and later fell out of status are eligible for bond, a distinction that explains why Kasper Eriksen, a white Danish national who overstayed his visa after his wife’s pregnancy complications, was released from detention this spring.
“I don’t have the stats, but the policy means most people are not eligible for bond right now,” Ali said.
Even for those deemed eligible, the financial burden is crushing. TRAC data show most bonds fall between $5,000 and $25,000--sums representing months or years of savings for low-wage immigrant families. Unable to pay, many detainees languish for months, pressured into accepting deportation or plea deals.
The nationality of those who have been awarded bond shows a specific bias.
According to TRAC data, citizens of non-white, non-Western countries were denied bond at far higher rates than those from stereotypically white places. For example, immigrants from countries whose populations are primarily people of color were denied bond at rates between 49.2 percent and 62.3 percent in 2025, while the rate of denials plummet for nationals from Poland, Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Ireland and New Zealand.
In instances where a Western country has a low rate of its citizens being granted bond, it also usually has a high rate of withdrawal, meaning the detained person withdrew their application for bond and most likely accepted deportation. Withdrawal rates for Central American nations such as India, China and Cuba were far lower, indicating a reluctance to going home.
While immigrants of color languish in for-profit detention centers, denied bond and asylum at staggering rates, the administration’s new refugee policy openly favors white applicants. Trump officials defended the decision to prioritize white South Africans as an effort to help “victims of illegal or unjust discrimination in their respective homelands.”
Critics describe it as the restoration of a racial hierarchy within American immigration policy.
That hierarchy is visible in the immigration courts of Mississippi and Louisiana, where many detainees appear only by video from remote jails hours away from their lawyers and support networks. The hearings unfold with little public oversight, few lawyers present, and almost no media coverage. In those rooms, or on those screens, a person’s chances often depend less on evidence than on their birthplace, the color of their skin, or the zip code where they were arrested.
“It’s so hard to see,” Ali observed. “It’s heartbreaking.”
Image: Canton, Mississippi ICE raid (via Department of Homeland Security)