Lafayette Parish Sheriff Mark Garber confirmed on Friday that his office has been in negotiations with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to turn a sheriff-owned building, the LPSO Annex, into a 72-hour holding facility for immigrant detainees.
“When ICE said: ‘Hey, would you be interested in doing that?,’ we jumped at the chance,” Garber says. But, he adds, talks have stalled since.
In April, LPSO spokesperson Valerie Ponseti told The Times-Picayune that the sheriff’s office was in “active negotiations with ICE to fulfill key regional functions.”
In an interview with The Current on Friday, Garber confirmed that this was in reference to an offer from his office to federal immigration enforcement agencies to temporarily house immigrant detainees at the jail annex building, a 15,000 square-foot facility built in 1993 to house federal inmates, with enough space for 96 detainees.
However, those negotiations have become less active in recent months, according to Garber. “I haven’t heard anything from them, I can’t get an update,” he says. “I think they’re just overwhelmed.”
An increasing number of Louisiana state and local agencies have entered formal partnerships with ICE.
State agencies from Louisiana Alcohol and Tobacco Control to the Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, along with state corrections, police, military and the fire marshal, have all entered agreements with ICE under the 287g program over the past four months. Several local law enforcement agencies are also partners under that program.
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The 287g program gives state and local law enforcement agencies authority to perform certain immigration enforcement actions.
They can do so under three different models: the jail enforcement model, the task force model or the warrant service officer model.
Under the jail enforcement model, authorities operating correctional facilities are tasked with identifying and processing immigrants they arrest and deem “removable.”
According to Garber, entering a 287g agreement with ICE would not be economically feasible at the moment, but LPSO is taking a proactive approach similar to that model by alerting ICE when they suspect someone booked into the jail may be in the country illegally.
Other state and local agencies in Louisiana have signed on to serve under the task force or warrant service officer models, which train and empower their staff to perform immigration enforcement actions in their regular line of duty, such as police patrols, and serve and execute immigration warrants in their local correctional facilities, respectively.
Participating in the 287g program requires officers to undergo training and regular recertification, something Garber says he doesn’t have the resources to commit to at the moment. He nevertheless asserts he’s happy to support ICE.
“If ICE comes in today and they say: ‘Hey, we want you to help us go round up 50 undocumented people,’ we will absolutely stand up and we will do it. We are available and ready to help them. They haven’t asked,” he says.
Garber says he’s aware of ICE activity within his jurisdiction, although there’s little communication from federal immigration enforcement to his office on that either.
“I get calls from citizens about guys jumping out of a pickup truck wearing masks. And, you know, they think it’s, like, a kidnapping,” he says. “And I’m like: it’s probably ICE. And then I check and find out that they’re doing their one arrest a day, you know. I think there’s some kind of quota that the [Department of Homeland Security] set for ICE agents across the country.”
Despite calls from citizens concerned about what look like kidnappings, Garber says he finds his constituency overall to be just as supportive of President Donald Trump’s immigration enforcement agenda as he is.
“They like it. They’re uniformly happy,” he notes.
Turning the jail annex into a functional detention facility, whether it be for local inmates of immigrant detainees, some investment would be necessary, according to Garber. LPSO previously offered opening the annex to Lafayette Consolidated Government as a solution for jail overcrowding in 2024, but LCG declined to pay the cost.
If ICE wanted to take him up on his offer, Garber says, the federal government would have to foot the bill to renovate and staff the annex. Now, he’s waiting to hear back from the federal agency. “The ball’s in their court,” Garber says.