This story is a collaboration between The Lens and Bolts, a nonprofit publication that covers criminal justice and voting rights in local governments.
OBERLIN, LOUISIANA — The last time Orolua Eluonyechie saw his son, the boy was six. He liked monster trucks and Spiderman. Eluonyechie loved to dote on him.
“That was his boss. The little six-year-old, bossing the big 45-year-old man around,” recalls his wife, Shadia. “He is a hell of a father.”
But Eluonyechie’s son is eight now. He’s upset because Eluonyechie keeps missing his birthday. The boy doesn’t understand why his dad won’t just come home.
Eluonyechie, a Nigerian native, has been held in immigration detention for over two years. He is now in Allen Parish in southwest Louisiana, where he was transferred after first being taken into ICE custody in Atlanta in April 2024. While detained, he has been injured by guards and repeatedly thrown in solitary.
Desperate, last summer, he hit the legal equivalent of the emergency button: While his case languished in immigration court, he filed a habeas petition in federal court, appealing to a higher authority.
When someone files a habeas petition—also known as a writ of habeas corpus—they are arguing that the government is detaining them unlawfully. If a judge agrees, they may order the government to immediately release the person.
In his petition, Eluonyechie asked a judge to intervene and force DHS to either release or deport him. Then he waited for something to change.
He is still waiting.
Up until last year, a habeas petition was a rarely used last resort for immigrants detained for more than six months after an order of removal, which is considered ”prolonged detention.”
But beginning last year, a series of compounding policy changes to accomplish Trump’s mass deportation scheme—including mandatory detention and third-country deportations—have left thousands of people like Eluonyechie in Louisiana trapped in what attorneys warn are seemingly endless detentions with little hope for freedom. As a result, immigrants who have found themselves detained for months or years are now filing habeas petitions, swamping the dockets of federal judges in detention-heavy states like Louisiana—and making it nearly impossible for judges to act quickly on these emergency pleas for release.
“Habeas is no longer a last-resort remedy: It is the only remedy for the vast majority of immigrants,” said Mary Yanik, director of the Tulane Immigrant Law Clinic. In the five years spanning 2020 through 2024, immigrants detained in Louisiana filed 291 new cases. In just the first five months of 2026, Louisiana’s federal courts have been flooded with over 1,200 such petitions.
The crisis is only accelerating: More detained immigrants filed habeas petitions in Louisiana in the last two weeks of April 2026 than during the entire four-year period from 2021 to 2024. As of June 1, Louisiana has over 1,000 open habeas cases filed by immigrants arguing they are being unlawfully detained. Virtually all were filed after the policy changes ICE and DHS made last year.
The resulting bottleneck in the courts has effectively closed the last route to freedom for many in Louisiana ICE detention—even those unlawfully detained.
Eluonyechie’s habeas petition sat for nine months before his lawyer finally withdrew it. He remains detained in the Allen Parish Prison Complex, which is overseen by Sheriff Doug Hebert III. Under Hebert, the jail receives hundreds of thousands of dollars from the federal government in exchange for holding immigrant detainees. It’s the only one of Louisiana’s ten ICE detention centers that’s run by local authorities, rather than a private company.
Eluonyechie currently has no criminal convictions nor charges pending. “He’s not a criminal,” said Andy Mosher, who represented Eluonyechie in the habeas case. But he is being treated like one. “It’s imprisonment,” Mosher said. “It is a black hole. Nobody is paying attention to him.”
Eluonyechie filed a new habeas petition in April. It is still pending.
‘Sitting in these cages with no end in sight’
A habeas petition is what led to the release of Mahmoud Khalil and other high-profile people in ICE detention. But Khalil’s attorneys managed to file his habeas petition shortly before he was whisked down to Louisiana, and thus his case was heard in New Jersey’s circuit court—one that is much friendlier to civil rights petitioners.
The majority of the petitions in Louisiana, about 90 percent, are being filed in the Western District court, where all but one of the state’s ICE detention centers are sited.
The astounding number of habeas petitions “definitely is overwhelming this court,” said Yanik.
Louisiana has the second-highest number of immigrant detainees in the country, after Texas. But Louisiana is a far smaller state, with far fewer federal judges, all of them still juggling a normal docket of cases along with the flood of habeas petitions. And because habeas statutes give the petitions urgent status, they are supposed to be given priority and moved to the front of the line, impacting judges’ abilities to address other matters on their dockets.
But until overburdened judges can consider each petition, detainees must wait.
“People are just sitting in these cages with no end in sight,” said Bridget Pranzatelli, a staff attorney with the National Immigration Project. Since Trump’s second inauguration, she says, it’s become “very, very common” for people like Eluonyechie to be “languishing in immigration detention, on American soil, in civil confinement, for just really, extremely, extremely, unfathomably prolonged periods of time.”
At the same time, there are now “swaths of people” within the centers who should not be detained at all, she said. “The number of people who are detained outside the scope of the law has increased dramatically.”
This is a big part of why habeas petitions have spiked. “Everyone is turning to the federal district court to seek this relief,” Pranzatelli said.
Data suggest that lengths of detention have also jumped astronomically. In March 2024, there were 412 detained immigrants who had been in custody for more than a year. By March 2026, the last time ICE provided detention statistics, that number had more than quintupled to 2,220 people.
A perfect storm
The specter of indefinite detention first began to loom last summer, when DHS changed two longstanding national immigration protocols, kicking off what Pranzatelli called “a perfect storm” in Louisiana.
First, in February 2025, ICE began telling its officers to re-detain and hold onto people who’d been granted withholding, meaning they’d been ordered deported but who couldn’t be sent to their country of origin due to fear of persecution or torture—for example, a gay person from Uganda. Typically, immigration judges would order such people released via an order of supervision, which stipulates conditions including regular check-ins with ICE. Then in June, the Supreme Court made a ruling that allowed ICE to send such people to a “third country.”
A month later, DHS instituted a policy of mandatory detention, declaring that any immigrant who’d entered the U.S. “illegally” was ineligible for bond—even people who’ve been living in the country for decades.
Around the same time, as immigrants who had been free for years went to routine ICE check-ins, ICE began arresting them, bringing them in “illegally, for the most part,” said Nora Ahmed, legal director of ACLU Louisiana. And once detained, they couldn’t bond out.
Most courts have rejected the DHS mandatory detention policy. A recent Politico analysis of nearly 12,000 cases found that federal judges ruled against Trump’s immigration policies in 90 percent of cases, including most of the 62 Louisiana cases that have concluded as of mid-June. Three federal appeals courts also have ruled against it. But the conservative Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals—which includes Louisiana, Texas, and Mississippi—upheld the new policy, becoming one of only two federal circuit courts to do so. Another challenge to the policy’s constitutionality is now unfolding in the Fifth Circuit.
Eluonyechie’s case is somewhat complicated, and he’d already been detained for about a year when DHS began making its policy changes last summer. Since he was first detained, he has married Shadia, a U.S. citizen, but he remains in ICE custody. His case is now sitting in front of the Board of Immigration Appeals, which the Trump administration has shrunk and stacked with appointees who favor his mass deportation goals. The board’s decisions enabled the new policies.
Sitting within the Fifth Circuit with no access to bond, Eluonyechie, like many others, sees no foreseeable end to his detention. His case, Pranzatelli said, is “representative of a phenomenon we’re seeing, of people who are just stuck in purgatory,” sometimes for years.
But the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2001 that a person cannot be detained indefinitely simply because no country will agree to accept them. Even people with deportation orders must be released eventually if DHS can’t find a country to take them. That ruling didn’t specify a hard deadline, but generally, courts have sided with habeas petitioners if they haven’t been released six months after a final order of removal.
That likely explains why it was around December 2025—about six months after the policy changes—when habeas petitions in Louisiana began to spike.
“We’re finally at the prolonged detention period for a lot of those folks,” affirmed Ahmed, and “now you have certain judges that are outraged” in the face of “a concerted effort to just completely violate the law” by DHS.
Allen Parish, “where people go to disappear”
Eluonyechie is sticking it out, continuing to fight his deportation because he wants to see his son again.
But he understands why other detainees give up fighting their case and ask instead for rapid deportation when faced with the conditions in the Allen Parish Public Safety Complex. It’s “been hell,” he said.
The detention center, which has the longest average stay in the state, is “where people go to disappear,” immigration advocate Tania Wolf said.
Run by Sheriff Hebert, the detention complex began taking ICE detainees in 2016. At the 2018 groundbreaking to add a dedicated ICE facility, Hebert, who has been sheriff there for 14 years, told the audience that, thanks to ICE, “I have a real possibility of infusing a million-plus dollars into my budget.”
A copy of the agreement between ICE and Allen Parish, obtained through a public records request, shows that the facility is charging $347,000 to operate from August 2025 to July 2026, plus $21.95 per detainee per day (increased to $29.75 when there are over 170 detainees). On top of this are additional fees for transporting and feeding detainees.
That means Allen Parish profits when ICE keeps the center full.
Since at least 2021, the detention center has faced serious allegations of mistreatment and racist abuse of detainees, and calls for it to close. A December 2024 ICE inspection found 28 deficiencies at Allen Parish, including trash and scum in the showers, failures to respond to formal grievances, and a lack of recreation. “The facility has trended downward,” noted the report.
Neither the Allen Parish sheriff’s office or ICE responded to multiple requests for comment for this article.
Yet this year’s inspection report by ICE, published in March, found zero deficiencies. Inspectors said that in interviews with 50 detainees, all reported satisfaction with the facilities, and none reported mistreatment or discrimination.
Eluonyechie was present when that inspection took place, and says he was among the interviewees. He was incredulous to hear the published results.
“It’s false,” he said. “Everything they wrote on 2024, it’s still like that in 2026,” he stressed. He added that he directly told an inspector during the interview that the staff discriminate against Hispanic detainees: “They treat the Hispanics different, real terrible,” he said. “If they ask for water, they don’t give them water.”
In February, Eluonyechie was allegedly assaulted by four officers in an incident stemming from a dispute with an assistant warden over a blanket. Eluonyechie says the officers tackled him from behind, forced his head to the ground, and restrained him, breaking his left finger. When he asked for medical care, and to file a grievance, both requests were denied. He was then placed in solitary for a week, per Eluonyechie and a complaint Shadia emailed to the sheriff’s office in April. She never received a reply. Over a recent video call from the detention center, Eluonyechie held up his finger. It was clearly still crooked.
“Where we came from, there is a reason why we left there. We don’t have a government, we don’t have accountability, we don’t have fairness, we don’t have justice. You can only buy those things if you’re wealthy,” said Eluonyechie. “Just like Louisiana.”
The Lens and Bolts spoke to several current and former Allen Parish immigrant detainees. Their accounts likewise painted a picture of brutal conditions.
They don’t trust the tap water and rely instead on a large orange cooler, which detainees have to beg officers to refill, often waiting for hours, said Rikesh Thapa of Nepal. “When we run out of water, we bang on the windows, but we’re not allowed to bang on the windows because they say that’s a violation.”
Detainees are fed rice and beans, no fruits, no vegetables, they said. Sometimes, when it rains, the roof leaks onto beds. They have been given secondhand, stained underwear to wear. Sometimes the air conditioning or heat stops working, making people sick. On at least one occasion, scabies ripped through the camp, causing rashes so bad people couldn’t sleep or sit, but “the medical care here is zero,” Eluonyechie said. They scratched their skin until it tore, and stood in the hot shower, scalding their skin to relieve the itch. Still, they were refused visits to medical staff. Detainees “were actually fighting to get deported because of this,” he recalled.
“You actually see people’s health deteriorating here,” Thapa said. ICE has not paid a third party for detainee medical care since October, according to recent reporting.
Thapa and others organized a protest for better conditions, by staying out in the recreation yard where they could breathe easier. Guards threatened them with smoke grenades; more than a dozen people were put in solitary for days.
They’re “always looking for a reason to put us in solitary,” Eluonyechie told The Lens and Bolts one afternoon. The next day, Mosher, his lawyer, called to report that Eluonyechie had been put in solitary, reportedly for asking a question.
The poor conditions are deliberate, detainees say. It breaks people’s spirit, said Ahmed of the ACLU. “People can tolerate immigration detention for about three months,” she said, “because people just can’t even comprehend what is happening to them.” After that, they become desperate, she said. Some stop fighting their cases.
But even that doesn’t mean freedom.
Christian Ogunghide, who came to the U.S. almost 20 years ago and misses his three daughters, said he’s “tired, because I didn’t expect to be here for so long.” He gave up fighting his deportation and asked instead to expedite it so he could attend his dad’s funeral in Nigeria last December. Months later, he was still detained.
Many others are also no longer fighting their cases but are still being kept indefinitely, immigration attorney Jeremy Jong said. At that point, a federal judge’s intervention becomes their only hope. “What is ICE’s plan here?” Jong wonders. “Unless a court gets involved, ICE will hold somebody 10 years, 20 years, 30 years. They’ll hold them literally forever.”
Even for those who don’t give up, constant delays by ICE make cases drag on. ICE has failed to transport Eluonyechie for court four or five times, which means hearings have to be rescheduled, Mosher said.
“There’s no bail, no bonds, you just stay here,” said Thapa, whether or not you’re eventually found deportable. “It’s psychological torment. I spent 14 months in prison, and the prison time was lovely compared to detention time.”
‘He will never be released by ICE’
The prolonged detention is perhaps most troubling for those at “Camp 57,” one of the state’s highest-profile immigration detention centers, opened at the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola by Governor Jeff Landry and then-DHS Secretary Kristi Noem. Landry offered ICE Angola’s notorious Camp J—the solitary unit that was shuttered in 2018 after repeated findings of inhumane conditions—for immigration detention. The habeas petitions filed from Camp 57 paint a picture of people afraid they’ve been locked up illegally and permanently.
One man feared ICE would continue trying to deport him “using unlawful processes, and detain him endlessly,” according to his petition. “Under the circumstances the Petitioner’s detention has become indefinite, prolonged and excessive and he will never be released by ICE.”
Even if detainees successfully win their freedom, ICE may then simply re-arrest them, warned ACLU’s Ahmed. That’s exactly what happened to Akram Omar, the 77-year-old Louisiana grandfather who had a heart attack while in Camp 57, and was finally released in May by a federal judge after seven months in ICE detention—only to be picked up by ICE agents 10 days later, who tried to whisk him onto a flight the next morning. A federal judge made ICE re-release him pending a motion hearing later this month.
Immigration attorney Joseph Giardina, who represents people detained in Louisiana, says that based on his experience, he estimates ICE will only realistically be able to deport less than ten percent of such cases to a third country. Third-country removal before Trump was exceedingly rare: From fiscal years 2020 to 2023, ICE removed just five people who’d been granted withholding to alternative countries.
“That’s why we’re having to file the habeases. They will hold them indefinitely. I’ve only seen a handful of people released on their own accord,” Giardina said. In other states, habeas cases take a matter of weeks, while in Louisiana, it can take several months. “They can’t possibly keep up with all that,” he said.
The long response times to habeas petitions mean some people never see relief.
Sometimes, ICE deports people before a judge rules on their petition. A Georgian man whom Giardina represents was sent to Moldova when his habeas case started gaining traction, he said.
Pejman Karshenas Najafabadi, an Iranian who’d been in the U.S. since 1991, was detained by ICE last April. In October, he was transferred to Angola, and the next month, he filed a habeas petition, alleging that ICE was holding him illegally. In March, after ten months in ICE custody, he collapsed and died. His case was closed.
