Natchez taxi driver not alone in profiting from desperate immigrants released from detention

A Mississippi taxi driver accused of exploiting and coercing immigrants released from an Adams County prison has operated the scheme for far longer than previously known—and, according to new information obtained by The Mississippi Independent, is among dozens of drivers profiting from a broader predatory taxi market in the state and in neighboring Louisiana.

Karen Hester, a longtime immigration activist who helps facilitate the release and transportation of immigrants from detention centers across the United States, said via email that she had used Otis Anderson’s Natchez-based taxi service for years to transport immigrants to airports in Mississippi and Louisiana.

“I have over the course of perhaps the last 5-6 years paid $325 plus for maybe 5-6 asylum seekers leaving Adams with Anderson taxi,” she told The Mississippi Independent, referring to the Adams County Correctional Center just outside Natchez, Mississippi. “I’ve always thought it was a racket as ICE should be transporting them,” she added, citing the agency’s gargantuan funding.

It turns out Anderson’s operation is not an isolated case.

Interviews with immigration advocates and lawyers, along with fare quotes obtained from Louisiana and Mississippi taxi companies listed in ICE documents, reveal that Anderson’s business is part of a broader system of apparently independent drivers who charge immigrants between $300 and $1,150 per person to reach airports and other transportation hubs after their release from detention.

Immigration advocates say the exploitative market has taken root amid ICE’s years-long failure to enforce federal detention standards requiring ICE officials and staff at privately operated facilities to transport detainees to local transportation hubs during operating hours. Instead, immigrants are routinely released from remote facilities with few practical ways to leave, creating a captive market for drivers able to demand exorbitant fares from people with little money, limited English and no knowledge of the area. Sometimes the drivers have well-connected spouses or partners on the inside.

Meanwhile, nonprofit organizations offering free transportation have been sidelined, advocacy groups say.

“We have always cared a lot about the taxi situation,” said Frances Kelley, Shreveport coordinator for the Louisiana Advocates for Immigrants in Detention, or LA-AID. “Because it was what was right in front of us, and what we were seeing, and we were hearing about people having to pay these exorbitant amounts of money.”

Kelley added: “There’s some kind of arrangement because the taxi drivers would get called and we wouldn’t.”

Rulebreakers

As The Mississippi Independent reported last month, Anderson was accused of threatening to have a recently released immigrant child returned to detention at the Adams County facility if he could not find a way to pay the $300 taxi fare to Baton Rouge Metropolitan Airport. The child, Aurelio Cornejo Serrano, said two other immigrants were also charged $300 each for the same trip.

His uncle paid the fare, according to text messages between the uncle and Anderson that were shared with The Mississippi Independent and the Spanish-language newspaper El Molino Informativo. The cellphone number in the messages was confirmed as Anderson’s after he responded to texts from The Mississippi Independent.

What distinguishes Anderson from other drivers charging rates as much as three times a standard Uber fare is that his wife is employed by CoreCivic, the private company that operates the Adams County detention facility. Tameka Moore-Anderson works on the receiving and discharge team. One of the unit’s responsibilities is arranging and approving transportation for immigrants being released.

CoreCivic, like all private companies and government agencies operating immigration detention facilities, is legally required to follow a series of federal rules when preparing detainees for release. Those rules include allowing a detainee one free telephone call to “facilitate release arrangements,” according to the latest National Detention Standards, updated in June 2026. The standards also say that “when appropriate,” detainees are to be taken by facility staff to a transportation station while it is still open.

The exception applies when a public transportation hub is within one mile of the facility, in which case detainees are to be given an information sheet with directions and available transportation options, according to the standards. The Adams County detention facility, like almost every immigration detention center in Mississippi and Louisiana, is not located within one mile of public transportation, meaning transportation should be provided by the facility, per federal rules. The nearest town with transportation options is Natchez, 12 miles away.

Yet transportation is rarely provided and is unlikely to be in the future, advocacy groups say.

“If they’re not going to fix the things where people’s lives are at risk, they’re not going to fix this,” Kelley said, referring to a slew of other complaints made against ICE facilities, including disgusting, barbaric, negligent, abusive and unsafe conditions.

For years, nonprofit organizations and volunteers collaborated with staff at detention facilities to transport large groups of released detainees. LA-AID regularly collected people from facilities in Louisiana and from Adams County. The organization operated out of an abandoned church where immigrants could shower, eat, find clothing and receive advice. Those without money could sometimes receive help paying for a plane or bus ticket.

But after the White House ended discretionary releases in early 2025, the need for such a large transport operation dried up.

“They told me that they were not allowed to release people anymore,” Kelley said. “And then they obviously stopped asking me to receive people.”

For years, immigrant advocacy groups have argued that detention centers in Louisiana and Mississippi have failed to meet the Performance-Based National Detention Standards, even as government audits declared the facilities compliant.

LA-AID filed a civil rights complaint with the Office of Inspector General in 2021 regarding what it described as “blatant” violations at facilities across Louisiana and Mississippi. The complaint focused in particular on failures to allow detainees to contact family members and instances in which people were left waiting in detention-center lobbies or outside overnight without being able to contact anyone.

A response from the OIG said the agency had shared the letter with internal departments “for their consideration as they plan future oversight activities.”

Why free transportation disappeared

How the situation reached this point is wrapped up in a series of complex and overlapping legal interpretations.

Federal policy changes in 2025 sharply curtailed ICE’s use of discretionary release and barred immigration judges from granting bond to immigrants who entered the country without inspection, regardless of how long they had lived in the U.S. The Fifth Circuit, which governs federal courts in Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas, upheld that interpretation, although four other appellate courts rejected it and some warned that it raised serious due-process concerns. Immigrants in detention began to swell to record numbers, by design: In January 2025, the Trump administration established quotas to increase the number of arrests from a few hundred per day to at least 1,200 to 1,500, increasing the chances that non-criminals would be detained; the following June, that number was increased to 3,000 per day.

With no bond remedy available and a shortage of immigration judges under the Trump administration, detainees filed more than 63,000 habeas petitions in federal court, asking judges to determine whether their detention was lawful and, in some cases, to order a bond hearing or release. Nearly 650 such cases have been filed in Mississippi’s Southern District, though the court has not granted relief to any detainee or issued substantive decisions in more than a handful of cases.

Declining releases has meant far less demand for nonprofit organizations and volunteers to transport released detainees. Yet some people who do not fall under those rulings are still being released, which should, in theory, make it easier for ICE and the private companies operating the detention centers to provide transportation or contact nonprofit organizations to help.

Taxi list doesn’t add up

Instead, detainees awaiting release are given a list of suggested local taxi options. The ICE-approved list serves seven of Louisiana’s nine detention facilities and the Adams County facility in Mississippi.

The Mississippi Independent obtained a November 2022 version of the list from an attorney representing an immigrant released from the Adams County facility in October 2025. Of the 23 taxi companies on the 2022 list contacted by The Mississippi Independent, two were no longer operating as taxi services, two telephone numbers were disconnected, two companies said the trip was too far, one number belonged to a limousine driver and another connected to the main office of Monroe, Louisiana’s public bus service. The two numbers listed for local Adams County taxi services, which would presumably be the most convenient and least expensive, were either disconnected or did not belong to a taxi service.

Ten taxi services did not respond. Four reported offering quotes ranging from $300 to $1,150. The quotes included some combination of a taxi ride, hotel stay and flights from Baton Rouge to New York City, a destination selected at random. One driver quoted $650 for the taxi ride alone. All four responding drivers were based in Monroe or Alexandria, Louisiana, both about two hours from Adams County.

The detainee released in October 2025 was ultimately transported by Anderson, even though his taxi service does not appear on the 2022 ICE taxi list provided to the detainee’s attorney. The Mississippi Independent obtained a separate ICE taxi list, from November 2025, from LA-AID. Anderson’s taxi service was also absent from that list. What is odd about the omissions is that James Wynn, another Natchez taxi driver, told The Mississippi Independent that he had seen Anderson at the detention facility repeatedly over several years, loading groups of newly released immigrants into a passenger van.

An individual detainee, relative or attorney could have found Anderson’s services online, but it is hard to explain how groups of detainees—independently detained, with limited access to phones and internet—would all somehow locate the same unlisted driver and coordinate a shared pickup. Their relatives and attorneys, when they had them, would have been scattered across the country and generally would have had no way to coordinate with one another. These circumstances raise a fundamental question: Who was arranging for Anderson to collect large groups of detainees simultaneously?

The Mississippi Independent also found a 15-passenger van advertised for sale by Anderson on an Adams County Facebook listing page, alongside a smaller minivan, suggesting that his business was equipped to transport larger groups. The larger van had “Anderson Transportation Natchez” printed on the door. The Mississippi Independent asked Anderson and CoreCivic whether Anderson’s wife, a senior officer in the receiving and discharge unit, or any other employee at the facility, had referred released detainees to his service or arranged the group pickups. Anderson did not respond. CoreCivic said only that its employees provide released immigrants with information about local transportation but do not select or contract with private drivers.

“When our government partners direct that an individual is to be released directly from our facility, our staff provide these individuals with information regarding local transportation options to help them reach their preferred destination,” CoreCivc said in an emailed statement. “CoreCivic does not have any contracts with private transportation companies for this purpose, nor do we receive any financial benefit from such companies. Individuals are free to make their own transportation arrangements, including those arranged by their legal representatives.”

The company also pointed to its Human Rights Policy, which outlines its commitments regarding the rights and treatment of people held in its facilities.

Moore-Anderson did not respond to questions about whether she helps provide transportation information to detainees, whether she or discharge staff recommend Anderson’s service or whether she had disclosed her relationship with him to CoreCivic. The company did not answer questions about the safeguards it uses to identify potential conflicts of interest among employees involved in releases.

Complaints do not prompt changes

Hester said she and fellow immigration activist Pat Leach had complained about transportation practices at detention facilities in the past but saw little change.

“I am sure we all know we are being scammed but have no choice as the power is with Adams—the internment camps,” Leach said in an email to The Mississippi Independent.

Leach said he had encountered similar “extortion” practices in California, suggesting the problem extends beyond Louisiana and Mississippi. At the Imperial Regional Detention Facility in Calexico, he said, drivers charged what he described as very expensive fares to people with few other options.

In another case, Leach said, a woman released at night from an ICE detention facility in California City refused to leave because no transportation was available.

“It is in the middle of nowhere,” he said. “She refused to leave the detention until mid-morning next day when her lawyer paid for an Uber to Los Angeles to her office.”

Questions remain about how transportation options are selected at Adams County, why advocates stopped receiving advance notice of releases and whether CoreCivic has adequately addressed the potential conflict created by a discharge officer’s husband repeatedly transporting people from the facility for hundreds of dollars per passenger.

For immigrants leaving detention, the opening of the facility doors may mark the end of their incarceration. But in remote parts of Louisiana and Mississippi, it does not necessarily mean they are free to leave.

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Image by Mike Williams