When a group of men without uniforms arrested Mahmoud Khalil inside his New York City apartment building in March, Khalil’s wife, eight months pregnant, asked them for identification. The men would not give their names or say what agency they worked for. All they said was they were taking Khalil, a legal permanent resident, to an immigrant lockup in downtown Manhattan.

The statement was misleading. Within hours, Khalil was whisked out of the state. He soon found himself in the Central Louisiana ICE Processing Center. The Columbia University graduate student, who had attracted nationwide attention by leading pro-Palestinian protests on campus and was not accused of any crime, spent more than three months imprisoned in the facility.

Central Louisiana is a for-profit detention center, owned

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