Boston Globe - (archived: https://archive.ph/UVhQc ) ICE is holding a Tufts PhD student at a Louisiana facility. Here’s what it’s like inside.

Other detainees have alleged unsanitary conditions, inadequate medical care, and abusive guards.

By Ian Prasad Philbrick Globe Staff,
Updated April 28, 2025

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TODAY’S STARTING POINT
Most Americans have never set foot inside an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facility. That can make it hard to picture the experience of people like Rümeysa Öztürk, a Tufts University PhD student from Turkey arrested by masked ICE agents last month after she expressed pro-Palestinian views in the campus newspaper.

But court documents, media reports, and eyewitness testimony paint a bleak picture of the remote Louisiana facility where Öztürk and about 700 others are being held. Technically called the South Louisiana ICE Processing Center, immigration lawyers call the all-women facility Basile, after the rural town where it’s located. Basile is about 100 miles from the ICE detention center where Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian student activist at Columbia, is being held.

A private prison company has run Basile since 2019. In recent years, detainees have described trouble reaching their attorneys, inadequate medical care, unsanitary conditions, and abusive staff. Today’s newsletter explores how Öztürk’s experiences, as she has described them, echo what other Basile detainees have reported.

Isolated
Getting to Basile isn’t easy. Homero López, an immigration lawyer who represents detainees there other than Öztürk, says that’s by design.

The facility is a nearly two-hour drive from Baton Rouge, the state capital, and about three hours from New Orleans, where López is based. Delivering documents that need a client’s signature can take a full day, and the waitlist to arrange a remote call is long. In an affidavit this month, Öztürk alleged that officials prevented her from speaking to her lawyer until more than 24 hours after she was detained.

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