Brianna Nofil

The Atlanta one is 11 days long, which is really remarkable because there's kind of so little memory of it.

But in the meantime, right, they no longer want to hold people in two facilities, right?

They now have this idea that this was kind of a recipe for disaster, that if you hold too many people together, it is giving people ammunition for organizing.

So they say, we're going to turn away from these two federal prisons and we're going to look back to our old pals, our old allies, the county sheriffs.

So they start calling county sheriffs throughout the country, but particularly in Louisiana.

And they say a very similar deal to what sheriffs were pitched 100 years ago.

Yeah.

It is something that the Immigration Service kind of continually goes back and forth with over its history.

Like there's a tension between do we want to have a few centralized sites of immigration detention or do we want to sort of scatter people among as many sites as possible?

Right.

And that maybe that decentralization, that lack of visibility is

Maybe that gives the immigration service more power, not only in kind of deterring organizing, but also like it's harder for the American public to get really angry about conditions at a detention center if people are at 300 detention centers versus two.

He's in a community called DeVoyles Parish, which is sort of perfectly in the heart of Louisiana.

And Louisiana, as we saw in Oakdale, right, had massive financial challenges in the 1980s.

They had some of the highest unemployment in the country.

The price of petroleum is absolutely plummeting, which has all these ramifications.

So these are communities that are very, very desperate for sort of any economic lifeline.

So they call Bill Belt and they say, you know, are you willing to hold these people in your jail?

And he says, yes, absolutely.

So he builds, over the course of his time in office, 1,300 detention beds in a community of just over 40,000 people.