Rümeysa Öztürk has been incarcerated—without any legal process—at the South Louisiana ICE Processing Center in Basile. (See: "ICE Kidnaps Tufts University Student—2,000 Protesters Immediately Respond in Outrage") This is one of nine ICE jails in Louisiana. These remote rural jails are set up to discourage “outsiders”—attorneys, journalists, family—from learning what’s going on, which leaves inmates who have been convicted of nothing totally at the mercy of racist guards and prison administrators.

This is why they are referred to as the “Black Hole.” 

In 2024, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) published a 108-page report, Inside the Black Hole: Systematic Human Rights Abuses Against Immigrants Detained & Disappeared in Louisiana. The report covers all nine of the Louisiana ICE jails, and is based mainly on interviews with 6,384 people. 

Here is a small taste of what the ACLU report reveals about the Basile jail:

A woman compares Basile with the Alabama prison she was transferred from:

I’m wearing a jumpsuit. I’m surrounded by barbed wire. I can’t go to the yard without permission from guards. But some parts here are worse. The food is smaller portions and rotten, about half the portions we got in prison. I have to represent myself in my legal case, even though I’m not a lawyer. And the guards here are more racist. They mock us just for being immigrants.

A Portuguese-speaking woman, denied interpreter services, is forced to sign a legal document:

An officer gave me papers but he didn’t read them to me. Because I can’t read or speak English, I couldn’t understand them. I tried to explain to the officer that I needed an interpreter but he ignored me. He started to get angry. I was afraid and just signed the papers. I think they are trying to deport me.

Two young physicians, Mariia and Boris, were imprisoned in Russia for opposition to the Ukraine war. After release they fled to the U.S., seeking amnesty. Instead, they were separated at the border and re-imprisoned. 

Here Mariia describes conditions at Basile that are truly shocking. Remember as you read these accounts that these are human beings who have been convicted of nothing, who fled their homelands in many cases because of political repression:

I saw boxes of food that had cockroaches in them. The drinking water had a strong chemical smell. We saw snakes. It was scary to try to sleep and always find something crawling on the wall or on your mattress, spiders and different kinds of bugs.…

All of the cleaning was done by us. The officers brought us tools for cleaning and forced us to clean.… They didn’t give us any gloves or protective gear. Sometimes they didn’t even give us paper towels, just a spray bottle. The unit smelled foul, like human feces. Our mattresses were dirty, stained, torn apart, and very thin. The sinks and toilets were always broken and dirty. We were only given two sheets and a thin blanket in bad condition.…

We often complained because the whole unit would run out of toilet paper. We would beg and beg but they wouldn’t give us any. Then if we filed a complaint, the officers would punish us by turning the TV on at full volume at night so we couldn’t sleep. One time after we complained, they didn’t provide us with any hygiene products for two weeks. They also would take away our walks and access to fresh air if we complained. We once went one week with no fresh air or sunlight.…

Every morning, we were given a small package of cereal and a small carton of milk. The milk was almost always expired.… For dinner, we got a few spoonfuls of beans and sometimes canned corn or canned green beans. Sometimes, we also got one small sausage, or a small piece of cornbread and a small cookie that was too hard to eat. On occasion, we got a small orange, but it would always be rotten inside. It always looked like someone vomited the food on our plates and brought it to us. The food smelled spoiled and rotten. It was impossible to eat.…

After three weeks in Basile, Mariia lost her period and developed other symptoms of malnutrition and hormonal imbalance. “I began to develop a rash all over my body whenever I tried to eat the food. I couldn’t eat anything and I started to feel very ill.”

She remained in detention for six months.

Her husband Boris, who was in the Pine Prairie Louisiana jail, summed up:

We anticipated that we would have to go through legal processes in the United States, but we didn’t expect to be placed in inhumane conditions, be tortured, or have Mariia reduced to an unconscious state in which she partially lost the ability to move.

Again, this is only scratching the surface—survivors of Basile report “rats the size of my arm” in the kitchen. The ACLU report describes physical abuse as well. “An officer in the cafeteria at Basile forcibly removed a woman’s shoe, scraped it on the surface of a table, shoved her in a seat, held her down, poured her meal tray on the table, and forced her to eat the food from the dirty table’s surface.” In another instance, “An officer at Basile cornered a woman and screamed at her so aggressively that she lost consciousness, fell, and hit her head on a metal bed frame. She later suffered recurring headaches and hearing loss.”

These are the conditions faced now by Rümeysa Öztürk, and by rapidly increasing numbers of foreign-born people who are now in the crosshairs of the MAGA fascists.