ICE Contracts a LaSalle Corrections Nonprofit for a 528-Bed Family 'Staging' Facility at the Nation's Largest Deportation Flight Hub

ICE finalized a contract in late June 2026 for a 528-bed immigration facility at England Airpark in Alexandria, Louisiana — the site of the largest deportation flight hub in the United States, which logged more than 4,400 immigration enforcement flights in 2025. The operator is the LaSalle Family Foundation, the nonprofit arm of the private prison firm LaSalle Corrections. ICE calls the site a “staging area” rather than a detention center, saying individuals will be held up to 72 hours before deportation. It is designed to hold unaccompanied children, families, and adult women, and was recorded as potentially operational as early as August 2026. Church leaders and immigrant-rights advocates are organizing against it as an expansion of family detention.

Two classifications are doing work here and both are worth naming as classifications rather than facts about the building. “Staging area” rather than detention center attaches a 72-hour ceiling in place of the standards, inspection regime, and reporting that follow the detention designation — the same beds, a different regulatory file. And the operator is a nonprofit foundation carrying the name of a for-profit prison company, which is the structure that lets a jail contractor hold children under an organizational form built for charitable purposes. Neither classification changes who is in the room; both change what the public record shows about it. Siting the facility inside the deportation flight hub collapses the remaining distance between custody and removal: a 72-hour hold beside the runway is not a place where a legal claim can realistically be developed. The corpus has tracked the LaSalle family-detention contract alongside the July arrest surge it was built to absorb (2026-07-01–ice-10k-arrest-surge-lasalle-family-detention-contract), and Louisiana as the venue where ICE has already redetained a 77-year-old Palestinian man in defiance of a federal judge (2026-06-10–ice-defies-federal-judge-redetains-77yo-palestinian-omar-louisiana).

Dating note: dated to the late-June contract finalization, not the September 18 advocacy campaign that resurfaced it.