The north Louisiana mill town of Jonesboro, saddled with a stagnant local economy and few job prospects and located more than 600 miles from the nearest international border, has never been much of a draw for people who come to America in search of a better life.

That has changed recently, but the new arrivals aren’t coming here by choice. Starting in March, guarded buses filled with immigrants began rolling through town, headed for Jackson Correctional Center. Dorms that had long housed Louisiana convicts are now home to about 1,000 immigration detainees.

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The prisoners are being held indefinitely by U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement while their cases wind their way through backlogged immigration courts. Most traveled long distances to the U.S.-Mexico border to seek asylum in the United States, claiming they fear violence, persecution or discrimination in their home countries.

In Jackson Parish, they spend their days shuffling around the jail in black-and-white striped jumpsuits in conditions that closely resemble prison. Guards keep close watch on banks of monitors and lead groups of detainees out of their crowded dorms to the cafeteria or recreation yard only at set times.

Most detainees wear bright orange Crocs and are told to clasp their hands behind their backs as they move through the hallways.

They’re among a sudden influx of nearly 7,000 immigration detainees brought to Louisiana by ICE over the past 18 months. As the number of immigrants held behind bars nationwide has grown under President Donald Trump, ICE has turned to Louisiana sheriffs and private prison operators. Louisiana is now the No. 2 jailer of immigration detainees, behind Texas.

Jackson Parish Sheriff Andy Brown signed an agreement to house detainees after ICE officials approached LaSalle Corrections, a Ruston-based private prison operator that’s now playing a major role in filling Louisiana lockups with detained immigrants.

Though the 1,250-bed lockup is the Jackson Parish Sheriff’s Office’s local jail, it’s owned by LaSalle, which funded its construction and handles its operations. For both LaSalle and the sheriff, the ICE deal presented a chance to boost revenue — and came at a moment when Louisiana’s Department of Corrections, which has long paid sheriffs to house state prisoners, is holding a dwindling number of inmates.

Cheap beds available

The boom in immigration detention in Louisiana stems from the availability of cheap jail beds in rural lockups like Brown’s. Sheriffs and private prison operators are happy for the business.

Brown, a career lawman freshly reelected without opposition, had periodically reached out to federal authorities about the prospect of housing detainees in his jail. When the Trump administration got in touch with LaSalle Corrections, Brown said, he began moving state prisoners out to make room.

“I’ve seen it as an opportunity, because we had reached out many times to do this,” Brown said in an August interview at the jail. “I can’t sit here and tell you an untruth. My thought was, ‘This is going to economically be better for my department and for this area.’ ”

The ICE deals have also been a boon for jail employees. Federal contracts dictate minimum pay that’s often far above what entry-level employees at rural lockups make. In Jackson Parish, pay now starts at $17.31 an hour, Brown said, more than many long-tenured employees used to make. Supervisors got raises as well, Brown said.

At Winn Correctional, another LaSalle-run facility that started housing ICE detainees in May, starting pay rose from $10 to $18 an hour. Winn Parish Sheriff Cranford Jordan told The Associated Press last month that the deal with ICE was a “blessing” of jobs and funding.

ICE pays the Jackson Parish lockup $74 per day for every detainee, almost triple what the state pays. It’s lucrative for the sheriffs and businessmen running Louisiana’s jails — but also a good deal for ICE, which negotiates pay rates individually with each contract.

In Louisiana, ICE pays an average of about $65 per day per detainee. Nationally, that figure is $126, nearly twice as much, according to Bryan Cox, a regional spokesman for ICE. Also, jails in rural Louisiana are near federal immigration courts in Oakdale and Jena as well as the Alexandria airport, a major hub for ICE Air, a charter airline run by the federal agency that operates deportation flights.

“So from an operational sense, it makes a lot of sense,” Cox said. “And from a taxpayer perspective, it makes a lot of sense as well.”

In Jackson Parish, the extra money has been used to overhaul parts of the jail and bring conditions up to ICE’s standards, which are more stringent than those imposed by the state Department of Corrections.

Gone are a handful of conference chambers and classrooms, replaced by makeshift courtrooms where detainees make their appeals to judges beamed in on wall-mounted television screens. Brown and LaSalle Corrections hired a pair of Spanish-speaking translators — for immigrants who speak other languages, guards use a phone hotline — and brought in the local newspaper’s part-time sports editor to organize sports tournaments and other diversions for those locked up there.

Striking a deal

Brown first struck a deal with LaSalle Corrections after winning office for the first time in 2003.

The new sheriff, a lifelong Jackson Parish resident who had been a deputy for years, hoped to replace the cramped jail on the top floor of the Jackson Parish Courthouse. Built in 1936, the lockup was under a federal consent decree and badly outdated.

“The conditions were horrible in that jail and … I knew I had to close that jail and try to come up with something that would benefit our parish,” Brown said.

In stepped LaSalle, which offered Brown a deal similar to ones it had struck with other Louisiana sheriffs during a prison-building boom in the 1990s. The private company offered to cover the entire cost of a brand-new jail for the parish — if the sheriff agreed to let the company decide how big it should be.

The resulting jail has room for 1,250 inmates — enough to hold 1 in 13 of Jackson Parish’s residents.

The glut of beds allowed Brown and LaSalle to house prisoners from the state, from other parishes, and even from other states with overcrowded prisons.

The company’s business model was to fill beds while keeping down costs. LaSalle is privately held, so it doesn’t publicly report earnings, and the company declined to discuss its financials.

“We did not need a jail this size,” Brown acknowledged. But building it on LaSalle’s scale meant taxpayers in a parish with waning oil revenue wouldn’t have to worry about footing the bill.

“This prison did not cost the taxpayers any money,” Brown said. “LaSalle Management came in and built this and, you know, they’re going to build it on a scale where it fits their needs, not necessarily mine.”

But the added scale, Brown noted, brought with it benefits for his agency and, from his perspective, for the surrounding community.

LaSalle Corrections pays the Sheriff’s Office a slice of its profits from the jail, Brown said, cash that keeps taxes down while funding patrol deputies and new equipment. This year, Brown estimated, he’ll receive about $750,000 from the jail to supplement his roughly $5 million budget.

Creating jobs

The jail also employs more than 250 people, from guards to maintenance crews. It’s a substantial number of jobs in a rural area with a moribund economy. Brown hires the staff as Sheriff’s Office employees, with LaSalle reimbursing him for salaries and benefits.

“In a small community I've been able to create over 200 jobs, and it's very meaningful in our parish,” said Brown. “And these jobs, not only the pay but they get health benefits. And so I'm proud of that fact. I don't back away from being able to do some of the things that we've done.”

For LaSalle, the Jackson Parish lockup — which first opened in 2007 — was a relatively late addition to the company portfolio. Co-owner Billy McConnell, who’d built a business running nursing homes, expanded into prisons as Louisiana’s inmate population exploded in the 1990s and the Department of Corrections began turning to sheriffs for beds.

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With the number of state inmates declining, LaSalle has pivoted to the newest incarceration boom — immigration detention. The company declined to reveal how many ICE detainees or state prisoners it now holds, but immigrants now appear to be sleeping in the majority of LaSalle’s roughly 7,900 Louisiana jail bunks.

LaSalle has cut deals with ICE to hold detainees at Richwood Correctional outside Monroe, River Correctional near Ferriday, Catahoula Correctional in Harrisonburg, the LaSalle Parish jail in Olla and Winn Correctional in Winnfield.

A cluster of jails the company runs in Tallulah are the only LaSalle lockups in Louisiana not currently housing immigrants.

Brown, stout with bulging, muscular arms, looks the part of a tough-on-crime conservative rural lawman. He supports Trump’s efforts to tighten border enforcement and argues that detaining immigrants might stem the flow of undocumented immigrants into the country.

But Brown, whose soft voice betrays an introspective side, said he also understands why some critics denounce a for-profit prison system or accuse him of doing business in human suffering.

“I’ve got mixed emotions about that — I do understand why somebody would say that,” Brown acknowledged. But he argued he’s simply doing what he sees as the best thing for his agency and his community.

“You know, if (the detainees) are not here, they would be somewhere else. I know I’m capable of doing this job and handling these inmates. They would be somewhere else; somebody else would be making this money.”

Isolation and uncertainty

Like most of the ICE detainees in Louisiana, many of those locked up in Jackson Parish are seeking asylum in the United States, claiming they can’t return to their home countries because of rampant violence and persecution there.

Saul Alcerro Sierra, 25, left Honduras nearly a year ago, fearing violent gangs in the country and police who he said harassed and tortured him because he is gay. He made his way through Mexico to Tijuana, where U.S. border guards made him wait for a month and a half before allowing him to turn himself in and seek asylum.

ICE denied Alcerro’s requests to be released on parole while he waited for an immigration judge to rule on his asylum request. He spent time at an ICE detention facility in rural Mississippi before being shipped to Jackson Parish in March.

During a reporter's recent visit, guards acknowledged struggling to communicate with detainees, but said they’re a far quieter and less troublesome crowd than the state prisoners they replaced.

“It’s like night and day. These are some of the best people,” Brown said. “The state inmates, you know, they’re more trouble and they’re more rambunctious and there’s constant problems.”

Alcerro brought a handwritten list of complaints about the Jackson Parish jail to an August interview: Toilets frequently back up; staggered mealtimes mean breakfasts as early as 3 a.m.; racist comments from guards and state inmates who run the kitchen; a constant stench in the dorms where detainees spend most of their days; and a total lack of privacy.

The food is another source of gripes; Alcerro and other detainees say it’s unhealthy. The sheriff said he eats meals inside the lockup himself, but acknowledged constant requests for things like fresh fruit, which remains forbidden, part of a policy aimed at stopping persistent — and sometimes ingenious — efforts by state prisoners to ferment alcohol.

The jail hired extra medical staff after signing the deal with ICE, which requires a higher level of care than the state’s prison system. But some detainees contend that treatment is frequently lacking, a charge that ICE strenuously denies. Brown said he stands behind the conditions in his lockup.

“I’m not out to abuse anybody or mistreat anybody, whether they’re a local prisoner or a state prisoner or a detainee,” said Brown. “You gotta keep in mind, nobody wants to be in jail … you know, nobody wants to be here.”

The isolation and uncertainty, however, are burdens that make the petty indignities of life in jail far harder to bear, Alcerro said in an August interview. He has since been granted asylum and released.

“It’s really difficult to be locked up in these conditions,” Alcerro said through a translator. “I’ve been in dormitories where I don’t feel safe. There are few people I can talk to.”

For those who are disruptive or feeling suicidal, a small cell where guards can keep constant watch awaits. There’s little inside but a mattress on the floor, stripped of sheets that despairing detainees might use to hang themselves.

Last week, a 43-year-old Cuban asylum-seeker named Roylan Hernández Díaz died in an apparent suicide at Richwood Correctional Center, the LaSalle-run lockup outside Monroe.

Alcerro and other asylum-seekers said they never imagined they’d spend so many months in jail while awaiting a ruling. But they’d prefer the long months in rural American jails to the abysmal conditions they’re trying to escape in their home countries.

“I’d rather be locked up because I cannot return back,” said Sergio Gomez, who fled El Salvador and remains in the Jonesboro jail as he awaits a Nov. 4 hearing where a judge will decide his fate. “I prefer to be locked up than return back to my country.”

Joanne Elgart Jennings, a special correspondent with PBS NewsHour Weekend, contributed substantial reporting to this story. Staff writer Ramon Antonio Vargas also contributed.

The Times-Picayune | The Advocate spent months reporting on the new realities of federal immigration enforcement in Louisiana in partnership with PBS NewsHour Weekend and Independent Lens. An upcoming collaboration will focus on rural jails in Louisiana.