The England Airpark board in Alexandria can still halt the planned ICE facility for children and families.

In February 2026, eight men sat in a room in Alexandria, Louisiana, and voted to lock up children and families for money.

Those men were the commissioners on the Board of the England Airpark Economic and Industrial Development District in Alexandria. They signed a contract to expand an  U.S. Immigration and Customs (ICE) detention center in Alexandria so that the facility could jail kids.

The building is now days away from opening. It has been several months since the men’s decision. But not a single one of them has found the nerve to say out loud that they got it wrong. 

Several board members have spent the summer obscuring and sugarcoating what they signed.

Those rosy views don’t fit with what news reporters for The Guardian found: that the facility itself may not even be fit for habitation, since it is built on a former military facility in Louisiana where the converted barracks contain possible lead and asbestos and the groundwater carries Pfas, the manmade synthetic toxins known as “forever chemicals,” at a high concentration, at least 575,000 times the federal drinking water limit. Though groundwater use is restricted, those chemicals migrate into indoor air through vapor intrusion. 

Looking for answers, I went to a meeting held on Sept. 24, 2026, that aimed to lay out the legal, environmental and humanitarian problems with the detention center. 

I was cut off from speaking after three minutes. Representatives from LaSalle Corrections and Anovaeon — contractors for the new detention center — got more than 15 minutes each.

So, I’ll address the board here, since they would not hear my comments there.

To the commissioners of Airpark

You were appointed stewards of public land in central Louisiana. By accepting that position, you agreed to economically develop the Airpark, according to Louisiana law. The law clearly states that you are required to function “for the benefit of the people” and improvement of “health and living conditions” of the people of Louisiana. 

The detention of children, families, and women does not serve that function. It does the opposite. 

Let’s talk about the money, since that’s the part you’ll discuss.

ICE will pay your district roughly $530,000. Your own attorney told the room on Sept. 24 that the Authority carries $8 million in liability coverage per occurrence and $10 million in aggregate. You won’t tell central Louisiana what ICE pays per detained person, or what the agreement obligates you to do, or what any of you reviewed before it was signed. But you have worked out to the dollar what you’re covered for when something goes wrong in there. People who are confident nothing bad is going to happen don’t buy that much insurance.

Your partner in all of this is the LaSalle Family Foundation, the nonprofit face of LaSalle Corrections. Four men have died in other LaSalle facilities, Winn and Richwood, in this year alone.

To say nothing  about the years of documented medical neglect across their prisons, retaliation against people who complain and the nonconsensual gynecological procedures at Irwin County, Georgia — that a Senate investigation had to look into — is blatant and strategic. You knew who LaSalle was. The reporting was public. 

When Anovaeon’s CEO stood in front of you and said his company is going to “take care of these people,” no one on that board asked what LaSalle’s version of taking care of people has looked like in Winn or Richwood. 

You signed anyway. 

Don’t relocate the center. Stop it from opening.

We are not asking you to relocate the detention center to better ground. Children do not belong in cages in Alexandria. If you relocated, they would not belong in cages, even if they were 20 miles up the road on land that has never held a drop of poison. A cage with a playground and soccer field is still a cage, as the children detained in Dilley, Texas, know all too well.

Detaining a four-year-old is a thing an adult chooses to do.

You picked this ground, so answer for it. 

You have not answered one question about what the toxins and the psychological effects of detention mean for a child sleeping there, for a mother, or for the guard you’ll hire out of Rapides Parish who doesn’t know what they’re breathing. The jobs will also damage the people who take them. Research from the Prison Policy Initiative found that nearly a third of  correctional staff suffer from post traumatic stress disorder, with depression close behind.

That’s the economic development you’re offering central Louisiana.

Bad choices and secrecy for the people you serve

The people of central Louisiana are now forced to choose: Would you rather continue to work in a job that pays $7.25 per hour, but is not on toxic land and will not have cascading consequences for your mental health, or take a job detaining children and families, which pays more but risks exposure to toxic substances and increased risk of mental disorders? 

Commissioners: by opening up this new facility, you are failing to deliver on promises of true economic development. Instead, you are leaving central Louisianans only bad choices, and looking the other way. 

You spent this summer building walls instead of answering  the people that you serve. 

In July 2026, your chair interrupted nearly every person who objected. In August you passed a permitting scheme requiring your permission to demonstrate on public land at the Airpark. Then you asked the public to hold their comments because the detention center wasn’t on the agenda; you promised a special meeting on September 8 for that purpose alone. 

People applauded. Helen Moore, who is 96,  came in from Pineville, sat back down and waited her turn. So did Gayle Lucas, 85. So did Jacalyn Duncan, 75.

On September 3 you canceled the special meeting, with no reason given then and none given since. We held our own forum in Pineville, Louisiana on September 21 to tell the community what is happening at the Airpark and answer their questions — which should be your job. 

On September 24, you finally put the detention center on the agenda but then locked the front door and used the Rapides Parish Sheriff’s Office to control who got in while letting Lasalle and Anovaeon in through the back.

You bear responsibility for future harms

Right now, somewhere in this country, there is a mother who will be put on a bus to Alexandria with her kids.  Whatever happens to them in your barracks will happen because 10 men in a boardroom on Arnold Drive decided it was worth $530,000 a year. 

If a child comes out of there sick, that’s on you. 

If a family is separated in that building, that’s on you.

If someone dies, the way three men died at Winn under LaSalle’s management, you will not be able to say you were never warned. 

You were warned, repeatedly, by your own neighbors, in a room you kept trying to empty. Release the contracts so central Louisiana can read what you signed in its name. Then terminate them. You can refuse to have mothers and babies locked up on your land and you can do it this week.

That would take some courage on your part. It’s not too late for you to find some. The people who showed up in February and July and August and September will be back in October, and after that. 

You can keep canceling your meetings and locking doors. It doesn’t make any of this go away. It only makes clear what kind of men you are, what you value, and what you’re worth. 

The only way to not be someone who locks up children for money is to refuse to lock up children for money. 

Tania Wolf serves as the Southeast Advocacy Manager at the National Immigration Project and is a member of the Southeast Dignity Not Detention Coalition. Born in Queens, N.Y. to parents who immigrated from Colombia and Ecuador, Tania has worked as an immigrant justice advocate for nine years, starting in New York City and now based in Louisiana. She coordinates and strengthens coalitions of community organizers and defenders across the Southeast, advocating for and with individuals detained by ICE, with a focus on dismantling immigration enforcement and detention systems.