Why ICE is really moving detainees hundreds of miles from where they were arrested

An Indian national working as a professor and studying in the US on a visa, Khan Suri was handcuffed on March 17 and taken to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement field office in Chantilly, Virginia, for fingerprinting, DNA swabs and paperwork, according to an amended complaint filed by his attorneys. He was moved to a detention center in Farmville, Virginia, in the middle of the night, and then to an ICE office in Richmond.

Next, he was taken to an airport, shackled, and flown to a detention facility in Alexandria, Louisiana. On March 20, Khan Suri was told he’d be sent to New York the next day, but he was instead driven to the Prairieland Detention Center in Alvarado, Texas. He was housed in a common room with a TV playing 21 hours a day, given a thin plastic mattress for a bed, went without religious accommodations for several days and was given “used, dirty underclothing” to wear, according to the lawsuit.

In all, he was transferred 1,300 miles away from home even though two Virginia detention facilities were not operating at capacity, according to the lawsuit. The transfers to Louisiana and Texas, his attorneys argued, were “not necessary.”

Khan Suri’s whirlwind journey is not unique. Other detained immigrants, including Tufts University grad student Rümeysa Öztürk and former Columbia University grad student Mahmoud Khalil, were taken on similarly circuitous routes to faraway facilities. All three were arrested near their homes in urban East Coast areas and swiftly shipped off to detention facilities in rural Louisiana and Texas.

These transfers underscore ICE’s power in deciding where to house detained migrants – a power that some immigration attorneys say the Trump administration is now using to move disfavored migrants far from their attorneys, families and support systems.

“We’ve always seen transfers within the immigration system,” explained Adriel D. Orozco, senior policy counsel at the American Immigration Council, an immigrant advocacy group. “I 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.”

Khan Suri’s attorneys argued in their amended complaint that the moves represent a new government policy “to retaliate and punish noncitizens” like him who support Palestinian rights or are critical of Israeli policy.

“DHS has issued a directive that all individuals who are subject to the policy be transferred to detention centers in the south of the United States to jurisdictions that Respondents perceive will be more favorable to them, and where they will be far away from their families and attorneys, and therefore unable to promptly challenge their detention,” the filing states.

ICE says detention is ‘non-punitive’

For its part, ICE defends its transfer decisions in terms of practicality and logistics. A spokesperson for the agency did not comment on any other reasons as suggested in Khan Suri’s complaint.

The agency 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 immigration detention facilities are located along the southern border with Mexico. In fact, about half of all ICE detainees in the US are held in Texas and Louisiana, according to data from Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), a nonpartisan data research organization that tracks immigration records.

Their transfers across multiple state lines have sparked jurisdictional battles between the US government and attorneys representing Öztürk, Khalil, Khan Suri and others. While those battles play out, they continue to be held in custody more than a thousand miles from home.

None of them have had their motions for release decided by a judge, and the legality of their detention have yet to be considered by the courts. None of them have been charged with a crime.

These types of interstate transfers have long frustrated immigration attorneys, who say they can be a form of “judge-shopping” to friendlier districts and limit migrants’ ability to contact their lawyers and families.

“Part of the problem is they can be picked up and moved around like chess pieces, and that goes back many years,” immigration attorney Neil A. Weinrib told CNN last month. “They’ve always done that deliberately.”

For Öztürk, Khalil and Khan Suri – each detained in connection to their apparent pro-Palestinian views – the underlying explanation for being moved thousands of miles away may be less relevant than its devastating impact.

While his jurisdictional battle plays out, Khalil, who is a permanent legal US resident, is sitting inside the Central Louisiana ICE Processing Center, counting down the days until his wife is due to give birth later this month.

“Justice escapes the contours of this nation’s immigration facilities,” Khalil wrote in a public letter dictated to his attorneys by phone last month.

“Who has the right to have rights? It is certainly not the humans crowded into the cells here. It isn’t the Senegalese man I met who has been deprived of his liberty for a year, his legal situation in limbo and his family an ocean away. It isn’t the 21-year-old detainee I met, who stepped foot in this country at age nine, only to be deported without so much as a hearing.”

The migrants’ many moves post-arrest

Court filings on behalf of Khalil, Öztürk and Khan Suri show the challenges migrants face in the detention system, including the whiplash of being arrested and shipped across the country.

In video of Khalil’s arrest, recorded by his wife, she can be heard asking officers multiple times where they are taking her husband. After ignoring her for several minutes, one of the officers says he’s being taken to 26 Federal Plaza – the Immigration and Customs Enforcement District Office in Lower Manhattan.

The moment set off a chain of events that are still being litigated in court.

 

As officers drove Khalil downtown, his lawyer raced to file a habeas corpus motion – a petition to determine whether someone is being held legally – in a federal court in New York. The process took several hours and required Khalil’s attorney to work into the night.

By the time the motion was filed, Khalil had been moved across the Hudson River to a detention facility in Elizabeth, New Jersey, without notice to his attorney. The government later told a judge the New Jersey detention center was unsuitable “because the facility was dealing with bedbug issues” and lack of space. Hours later, again without notifying his counsel, he was put on a plane from JFK airport to Dallas and then to Louisiana.

“Throughout this process, Mr. Khalil felt as though he was being kidnapped,” Khalil’s attorneys wrote in documents to the court. “He was reminded of prior experience fleeing arbitrary detention in Syria and forced disappearance of his friends in Syria in 2013.”

Following oral arguments on Khalil’s jurisdictional battle two weeks ago, his attorneys accused the government of purposely transferring not just Khalil but all the other student detainees. Ramzi Kaseem, one of the attorneys on Khalil’s legal team described the moves to CNN as part of a coordinated strategy on the government’s part.

“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,” Kaseem said. “For some reason they think Louisiana gives them home court advantage. 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 that they can deport them in silence.”

 

In Öztürk’s case, ICE officers determined there would be “no available bedspace” for Öztürk in the New England region prior to arresting her, attorneys for the US Attorney’s Office in Boston said in a filing.

But the lack of resources did not stop them from launching a dash across three states as they tried to find room – something her attorneys challenged later in court, saying the government had facility options in the New England area but simply declined to use them.

Her attorneys told a Boston court last week they were unable to locate her for several hours as immigration officers bounced her around the region.

First, Öztürk was moved to Methuen, Massachusetts; then to Lebanon, New Hampshire; and then to St. Albans, Vermont, where she was held overnight, according to court documents. From there she was transferred to Alexandria, Louisiana, followed by a final stop at the South Louisiana Correctional Facility in Basile – over 1,600 miles from her home in Boston.

“This all happened without notice to the court, without notice to her counsel,” Öztürk’s attorneys told reporters following a hearing in Boston last week.

Why ICE really moves detainees

One key explanation for why the government moves detainees to faraway facilities is because the majority of detention facilities are located in the southern US.

The ICE detention system is made up of hundreds of jails, prisons and other facilities, and many are concentrated along the border with Mexico, according to TRAC. Texas houses over 12,000 detainees, by far the most of any state, followed by Louisiana with about 7,000 detainees, according to March data from TRAC.

As of March 17, there was an average daily population of about 40,000 ICE detainees – meaning Texas and Louisiana house about half of all people in the detention system. By contrast, Massachusetts held just about 400 detainees on average, New York held about 650 detainees and Virginia held about 750, TRAC data shows.

The government generally has a lot of power in choosing where to house detained migrants, Orozco explained.

“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,” he said.

Immigration attorneys and civil rights advocates have sharply criticized many of these facilities for mistreating migrants and preventing them from properly defending their cases. They say the isolated nature of these rural detention facilities makes it difficult for migrants to communicate with attorneys, family and friends.

“When I’ve had clients, the difficulty there is not having a support system, not knowing what’s going to happen to you inside of those facilities. (That) can make it so that person decides that they just want to leave,” Orozco said.

For example, Orozco noted one former client who had been in the US for over 10 years, was married to a permanent legal resident and had two US citizen children. “But after three months (in detention) she said she couldn’t take being in that facility anymore, and so she decided to accept her removal and leave the United States,” Orozco said.

An ICE spokesperson did not comment on the attorney’s allegations of detention location being used as a punishment.

The isolation and difficult conditions in these facilities is a form of coercion, the nonprofit advocacy group Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights said in a 2024 report on the Louisiana immigration detention system.

“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 report stated. “And they use abusive treatment in punitive conditions to coerce people into renouncing those claims and accepting deportation to escape the misery of detention.”

Immigration attorneys have also criticized these detention transfers as a form of judge-shopping. The idea is that the judge or appeals court in Texas or Louisiana under the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals is likely to have more conservative legal views and be friendlier to the Trump administration’s actions than a court in New York or Massachusetts. Trump appointed six of the active judges on the Fifth Circuit, in addition to some two-dozen Trump appointees who sit in the district courts the circuit covers.

“I think that there’s maybe that kind of determination being made given that we’re not seeing every person sent to Texas or Louisiana, so they’re being very selective as to making sure that some of these folks are being sent to these facilities,” Orozco said.

Whatever the underlying reasons, court filings show the transfers have had harsh personal consequences for Khalil, Öztürk and Suri.

“His children keep asking their mother when their father will come home,” Suri’s filing states. “Dr. Khan Suri normally holds his older son every night at bedtime, helping him fall asleep. Lately, his son has been crying uncontrollably and has stopped speaking. He is worried especially about his older son.”