On September 5, the Louisiana National Guard announced that it was mobilizing approximately 95 personnel in support of Immigration, Customs, and Enforcement (ICE) operations within the state. “When the State of Louisiana and the United States of America needs us, we act,” said Major General Thomas C. Friloux,  the commanding general of the Louisiana Army National Guard and the Louisiana Air National Guard. “The Soldiers and Airmen of the Louisiana National Guard are trained professionals who embody the values of our military and understand what it means to protect the homeland.”

This announcement comes only two days after Louisiana officials confirmed that 51 male immigrant detainees had already been transferred to a new detention center on the grounds of the notorious Louisiana State Penitentiary, nicknamed “Angola”. Angola is on the grounds of a former slave plantation, and the mostly-Black prisoner population is still forced to do the same agricultural labor once performed by enslaved Black people on the very same land.

Grassroots activists are organizing a rally in New Orleans on September 16 to protest the deployment of the national guard, comparing the move to the Trump administration’s deployment of National Guard troops in other parts of the country, such as Washington, DC and Trump’s ramped up immigration crackdown in the Chicago area. The enforcement operations in Chicago escalated to fatal levels on September 12: On Friday, ICE agents fatally shot undocumented immigrant Silverio Villegas-Gonzalez after he allegedly drove his vehicle towards the agents.

“Just as in DC, Los Angeles, and now Memphis, Louisiana’s communities will continue to resist this racist police takeover,” said Jade Woods, another New Orleans-based organizer part of the planning for the rally on Tuesday.

“The deployment of the National Guard to assist ICE in Louisiana, it is the latest escalation in an ongoing attack against our immigrant communities,” said Cecilia Paz, one of the organizers planning Tuesday’s rally. “We know that the National Guard only makes bad situations worse just from history. We saw during Katrina that they came in and instead of helping people, they criminalized black working class people who are just trying to survive as looters rather than providing relief,” Paz said of the federal crackdown on looting amid Hurricane Katrina relief efforts in 2005.

“In terms of Angola being used as an isolation facility, we know that Angola prison is literally a site of modern day slavery. It is a former plantation that has been turned into a massive prison. It’s notorious for human rights violations. Prisoners are forced to endure forced labor through the Angola farm,” Paz continued. “At the same time, Louisiana has the second highest number of ICE detention facilities in the country. So this latest attack is an escalation and affirms how the far right uses Louisiana as a black site,” Paz said referencing how pro-Palestine students such as Mahmoud Khalil and Rumesya Ozturk were held in ICE detention facilities far from where both were originally from in the Northeast of the United States.

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