Women imprisoned by ICE in Basile, Louisiana, gathered around a detention tablet to create an emergency public record before the government could take away their ability to speak. “My name is Larina,” the woman leading the recording says before identifying the prison as the South Louisiana ICE Processing Center and describing what women around her have endured: separation from their children, untreated medical crises, physical abuse, labor coercion, sexual contact by staff, language discrimination and retaliation against those who defend themselves. Other women step before the camera to display bruises, an amputation and medical paperwork while describing a miscarriage, pregnancy without adequate care and kidney failure without medication or testing.
The women repeatedly warn that ICE or the facility may confiscate their tablets because they are speaking publicly. The recording is direct evidence created by women inside the system they are exposing. They speak while ICE controls whether they can call their children, reach their families, contact advocates, obtain medical treatment or remain connected to the outside world. The same tablet preserving their testimony is a communication tool that the prison can remove.
Larina says ICE separated her from her five-month-old daughter after she called police because her husband was beating her. Instead of receiving protection as a survivor of domestic violence, she says she was arrested and placed in immigration custody. She describes mothers inside Basile who do not know where their children are because authorities took the children and withheld information, while others cannot communicate with their families or fear that complaints will bring additional restrictions.
“I am a mother who left my five-month-old daughter when I called the police on my husband because he was hitting me,” Larina says. “And even though I was the victim, I was the one who got arrested.” Her testimony exposes family separation as more than physical distance. ICE controls whether a mother can locate her child, hear her child’s voice, participate in decisions about care or reassure an infant who cannot understand why she disappeared. When officers can remove calls or tablets as punishment, family contact becomes another instrument of custody.
Larina says she has already been ordered deported but has remained imprisoned for three months. Other women describe people waiting months for removal after their cases have ended, and they identify a Cuban woman who remained detained after winning her immigration case because the Department of Homeland Security appealed. The government calls Basile a processing center, but the women describe imprisonment without a clear endpoint.
GEO Group operates the South Louisiana ICE Processing Center for ICE. The company identifies the Basile prison as a 1,000-bed facility whose government client is U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. ICE supplies the federal detention authority, while GEO controls daily confinement under contract. Together, they hold power over movement, food, labor, discipline, medical access, communication and the conditions under which the women must survive.
Kelly, a Venezuelan woman, says she has only one functioning kidney and that the remaining kidney is failing. She displays documentation of her surgery while explaining that the facility has not provided the testing, medication or specialist care she needs. “They don’t even take me out for tests or checkups,” she says. “They don’t give me clean water, absolutely nothing.”
Kelly describes painful urination, fluid retention and recurring kidney pain. She says she wakes each day on a hard mattress with pain near her remaining kidney and has filed complaints without receiving meaningful treatment. She also says the frozen food served inside is inappropriate for her medical condition. Her fear is direct: something could happen to her in detention because the officials controlling her medical access refuse to provide the care she needs.
ICE’s detention standards state that detained people must have access to appropriate medical, dental and mental-health care, including emergency services. A federal inspection of the South Louisiana facility produced 15 general-custody findings and 20 medical findings, documenting that the government had already identified substantial failures inside the prison. Those written requirements and inspection records do not replace Kelly’s evidence. They show that ICE and GEO operated under formal medical obligations while women inside continued describing untreated illness and dangerous neglect.
The women identify Nancy, an Ecuadorian woman who was three months pregnant, as having miscarried in her bed without receiving medical attention. They say three pregnant women were being held in the unit when the video was recorded, including one who was six months pregnant, and that they were not receiving the care they needed. The video stands on the women’s direct evidence, while the government’s medical standards and prior inspection findings show that ICE and GEO had already been placed on notice about their duty to provide emergency and continuing care.
The women then bring Brisa, a Mexican mother with two children in the United States, before the camera. She displays an amputation and says she does not understand why the procedure was performed. The women around her connect the disability to inadequate medical care and say she wants to return to Mexico to see a doctor she trusts. Although she is awaiting deportation, the women say ICE continues to hold her after the procedure.
Brisa stands before the camera displaying a permanent disability that she and the women around her connect to the medical treatment she received in custody. ICE and GEO control the clinicians, medical records, transportation, grievance system and evidence needed to establish who authorized her care and why she was left without a clear explanation. They owe Brisa an accounting of what happened to her body while she was under their control.
Another woman comes forward with extensive bruising visible across her body. The speakers identify her as Honduran and say she was beaten, placed in isolation and prevented from contacting her family while the injuries faded. They use the phrase “the moon” for the place where she was held incommunicado. From their description, it functions as segregation: a place where communication disappears and an injured woman can be hidden from anyone outside the prison.
The camera lingers on bruising across her arms and legs as another woman says an officer grabbed her by the arm while pulling her from a vehicle, leaving visible marks. Their injuries are visible, and the women say officers caused the bruising or used isolation and communication restrictions to keep those injuries from reaching their families. They say the prison answers resistance with isolation, loss of privileges and communication deprivation, including threats to place women “in the moon” or remove access to their tablets when they defend themselves or complain. They describe injured women being cut off from family so photographs and calls cannot preserve what happened, turning custody control into a way to suppress evidence.
The women also report sexual contact between staff and detained women. That contact cannot be treated as an ordinary private relationship. Staff control housing, movement, discipline, medical access, communication, labor and punishment, making sexual contact with women under their custody an abuse of custodial power.
Basile already has a documented record of closely related complaints. A 2025 civil-rights complaint described sexual harassment and abuse, physical abuse, coerced labor, medical neglect and retaliation at the facility, including claims that people who reported staff misconduct were ignored or punished. That earlier record does not validate the new video; the women validate their own emergency through their testimony and the injuries and medical evidence they display. The complaint shows that ICE and GEO had already received warnings about similar harm inside the same prison.
The women say facility staff force detained women to work for one dollar for shifts lasting more than six hours. Kelly says staff asked whether the women would work and then threatened to withhold medicine after they refused. Labor cannot be called voluntary when the employer is also the jailer and controls medication, food, communication, privileges and isolation. A woman who cannot leave, seek her own medical care or refuse orders without punishment does not negotiate with GEO as an equal worker. The women describe labor extracted through detention power.
They also describe officers mocking them and denying meaningful assistance because they speak Spanish. Larina says staff claim they do not speak Spanish when women enter the dining hall, rush them out after only a few minutes and ridicule them when they cannot understand English. Language exclusion deepens every other harm because a woman denied interpretation cannot understand a medical decision, challenge an unexplained procedure, report an assault, defend herself during discipline, navigate her immigration case or learn what happened to her child.
The women describe pests, poor hygiene, scabies, illness and a lack of cleaning supplies. They say one Cuban woman repeatedly sought medical help for a skin condition without receiving a diagnosis, while contaminated mattresses and the absence of sanitation products allowed illness to spread. These accounts sit beside an official inspection record that found extensive medical and general-custody deficiencies at Basile, showing that the prison’s failures were not hidden from federal oversight.
ICE and GEO owe answers about the force used against women displaying bruises; the isolation and communication restrictions imposed after injuries; the treatment denied to Kelly; the miscarriage the women say Nancy suffered without medical attention; the procedure that left Brisa with an amputation; the care provided to pregnant women; sexual contact by staff; labor extracted under threats; medication used as leverage; the denial of Spanish interpretation; and the continued imprisonment of women who already have removal orders or favorable decisions. They also owe every woman shown in the video immediate protection from retaliation.
Larina closes by asking the public to become their voice. She warns that the tablets may be taken because the women complained and says that, should they suddenly lose communication with their families, people outside must understand why. The women did not wait for a mainstream outlet, an ICE inspection or a GEO-approved investigation to declare their suffering worthy of a record. They documented the prison themselves, displayed their injuries, named their medical emergencies and described the children they cannot reach and the punishment used to keep evidence from leaving the facility.
The women used the only tool still connecting them to the public to expose the same ICE and GEO system that controls that tool. If the tablet disappears after they spoke, the silence will not erase the record. It will become part of the abuse they documented.
The women in this video risked retaliation to document what ICE and GEO tried to keep inside the prison: physical abuse, medical neglect, family separation, coerced labor and punishment used to silence them.
Support Americans Against ICE so we can preserve testimony like theirs, investigate the systems responsible, and keep evidence of detention abuse in the public record after the cameras, tablets, and communication disappear.
