BIRMINGHAM, Ala. (WIAT) — About 200 miles northwest of New Orleans sits the town of Jena, Louisiana.

In its 2020 report, the U.S. Census reported Jena had a population of a little over 4,000 people. Travel a ways down Pinehill Road, however, and you’ll hit the Central Louisiana ICE Processing Center, also known as Jena/LaSalle Detention Facility, which on any given day has at least 1,170 inmates locked up inside, the majority of whom are people whose citizenship in the U.S. is questioned.

Last Friday, officers with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement took Alireza Doroudi, a 32-year-old doctorate student studying mechanical engineering at the University of Alabama, over 5.5 hours from the Pickens County Jail in Carrollton, where he had been since being picked up by ICE officers outside his home in Tuscaloosa on Tuesday morning, to the Jena facility. It’s the same place where Mahmoud Khalil, an outspoken Palestinian activist and Columbia University graduate who was arrested earlier this month in New Jersey, is staying.

Doroudi is staying in the facility following allegations from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security that he posed “significant national security risks” after his visa was revoked months following his arrival in the U.S. from Iran in January 2023. Doroudi’s attorney, David Rozas, said, however, his client has not been charged with anything and that despite his visa being revoked, he could have legally stayed in the country as long as he was in school.

“He has not been arrested for any crime, nor has he participated in any anti-government protests,” Rozas said in a statement to the Associated Press. He is legally present in the U.S., pursuing his American dream by working towards his doctorate in mechanical engineering.”

The facility has had its own share of issues over the years. In 2018, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security investigated four deaths at the jail between 2016 and 2017, which the department identified as following a trend of delayed medical care, lacking detail to training on suicide prevention and a “failure of nursing staff to report abnormal vital signs.” The report was unearthed in an NPR investigation in 2023.

In a piece published Saturday in The Guardian, Southern bureau chief Oliver Laughland covered immigration court hearings at LaSalle, putting the facility within the context of many ICE centers located across the Southeast known as “Detention Alley.”

“These distant detention facilities and court systems have long been associated with rights violations, poor medical treatment and due process concerns, which advocates argue are only likely to intensify during the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown and promise to carry out mass deportations that has already led to a surge in the detention population,” Laughland wrote. “But rarely do cases within these centres attract much public attention or individual scrutiny.”

In a 2023 report by the Louisiana Illuminator, sources described the jail’s suicide watch unit as having cells “secured behind a large metal door with a small rectangular window for guards to look through,” as well as a small window looking outside offering a “sliver of sunlight.”

“There’s nothing in there that is remotely warm. It’s all just metal and concrete,” said then-Freedom for Immigrants Associate Executive Director Mich Gonzalez. “It’s really like a concrete cage.”

The Jena facility, which opened in 2007, is the second largest ICE facility in Louisiana.

No information has been given on when Doroudi’s first immigration hearing will be.