Immigration attorneys representing migrants who have been detained from college campuses claim their clients have intentionally been sent thousands of miles away from their legal representatives and families.
The Trump administration’s round up of anti-Israel activists living in the United States under student visas began with the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, 29, in New York City last month.
In a video of his arrest taken by his pregnant wife, one of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents could be heard saying he was being brought to an ICE District Office in Lower Manhattan.
But by the time an attorney filed a habeas corpus petition arguing against his detention in a New York federal court, he had already been sent to a detention center in New Jersey. Hours later, he was flown to a facility in Louisiana.
Similarly, Georgetown University fellow Badar Khan Suri was arrested outside of his home in Arlington, Virginia on March 17 and was moved to different detention centers across the state before he was flown to the detention facility in Alexandria, Louisiana.
He is now being held at the Prairieland Detention Center in Alvardo, Texas.
More recently, Tufts University grad student Rumeysa Ozturk, 30, was snared by masked immigration agents close to her Massachusetts home and was transferred to facilities around New England – but is now also being held in Alexandria, Louisiana.
All three of their lawyers and immigration advocates now claim they were sent from the East Coast to the South to be further from their families and attorneys – and in jurisdictions with more conservative judges who may be more sympathetic to the Trump administration’s plans, they told CNN.
The Trump administration has been rounding up illegal migrants and sending them thousands of miles away from their friends and families
Many are now being held at the Central Louisiana ICE Processing Center in Alexandria
‘We’ve always seen transfers within the immigration system,’ Adriel D Orozco, a senior policy counsel at the American Immigration Council, told the news station.
But, he said, he ‘hadn’t seen such a drastic transfer system, in the sense of sending folks from the Northeast all the way down to the South.
‘That seems to be more of a change under this Trump 2.0,’ Orozco claimed.
Some of the attorneys now say the change is a form of ‘judge-shopping,’ suggesting a judge or an appeals court in Texas or Louisiana under the Fifth Court of Appeals is more likely to have conservative views and be friendlier to the Trump administration than the courts in New York, Massachusetts or Washington DC.
Trump had appointed six of the judges on the Fifth Circuit, as well as some two dozen judges on the district courts that the circuit covers.
In fact, in an amended complaint, Khan Suri’s attorneys argued that the Department of Homeland Security ‘issued a directive that all individuals who are subject to the policy be transferred to the detention centers in the south of the United States to jurisdictions that [the government] perceive[s] will be more favorable to them and where they will be far away from their families and attorneys, and therefore promptly challenge the detention.’
Ramzi Kaseem, one of Khalil’s attorneys, also described his cross-country transfers as part of the government’s coordinated strategy.
The Trump administration’s round up of anti-Israel activists living in the United States under student visas began with the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, 29, in New York City last month, followed by the apprehension of Georgetown University fellow Badar Khan Suri outside of his home in Arlington, Virginia on March 17
Tufts University grad student Rumeysa Ozturk, 30, was snared by masked immigration agents close to her Massachusetts home
‘It’s this shell game where the government is trying to make it hard for lawyers to prevent them from doing this so that they can pick the court where they want these cases to move forward,’ he told CNN.
‘For some reason, they think Louisiana gives them home-court advantage,’ Kaseem claimed. ‘They want to cut people off from their communities, from their base of support, from their lawyers, from their families, from their schools, their friends and isolate them so they can deport them in silence.’
The immigration attorneys and civil rights advocates have also hit out at the detention facilities for allegedly mistreating the migrants and preventing them from properly defending their cases.
They say the isolated nature of these rural detention centers makes it difficult for migrants to communicate with attorneys, friends and families.
‘When I’ve had clients, the difficult there is not having the support system, not knowing what’s going to happen to you inside of those facilities,’ Orozco said.
‘[That] can make it so that person decides that they just want to leave.’
The Robert F Kennedy Human Rights advocacy group even claimed that the isolation and difficult conditions of these facilities is a form of coercion.
‘In NOLA ICE detention, officials isolate people with viable defenses to deportation from the legal and language resources needed to fairly present their claims,’ the group wrote in a 2024 report.
‘And they use abusive treatment in punitive conditions to coerce people into renouncing those claims and accepting deportation, to escape the misery of detention.’
ICE has claimed that its transfer decisions are based on logistics
But ICE has claimed that its transfer decisions are based on logistics.
It says on its website that detention is ‘non-punitive’ and that it uses ‘limited detention resources to detain aliens to secure their presence for immigration proceedings or removal from the United States.’
Most of the ICE detention centers, though, are located along the southern border with Mexico – with about half of all ICE detainees being held in Louisiana and Texas, according to data from Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse – a nonpartisan research organization that tracks immigration records.
Texas, itself, houses more than 12,000 detainees – by far the most of any state – followed by Louisiana, with about 7,000 detainees.
By contrast, Massachusetts only held 400 detainees on average, New York had about 650 and Virginia held about 750.
‘Unfortunately, there is a lot of discretion – at least ICE states they have a lot of discretion – in where they decide to transfer individuals, and they’ve acted in that manner,’ Orozco said.
DailyMail.com has reached out to ICE for comment.