Deep Reads: A last lifeline in ‘detention alley’
Post Reports
The Washington Post
4.4 • 5.1K Ratings
🗓️ 23 August 2025
⏱️ 30 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Christopher Kinnison, 46, worked at his own one-man law firm in the central Louisiana city of Alexandria, putting him within a two-hour drive of the state’s nine ICE facilities, the highest number of any state other than Texas. Most of his clients were detainees, and his business cards promised “Fervent Representation for Uncertain Times,” because he knew how quickly immigration policy could change with every new administration. But nothing had prepared him for the change that began when President Donald Trump took office in January.
Arrests were up in every part of the country compared with the year before. There were reports of people being detained by ICE at courthouses, farms, car washes, a meat production plant in Nebraska, an Italian restaurant in San Diego and outside a church in Oregon, sending the number of people in immigration detention to more than 56,000, well over the budgeted capacity of 41,500.
One in every 8 of those detainees ended up in rural Louisiana, becoming some of the most hidden-away people in America. Every week, more calls came into the law office in Alexandria, and now it was half a year into Trump’s presidency, and Kinnison hadn’t been able to slow down long enough to process what his days at work were becoming.
Ruby Cramer reported, wrote and narrated the piece. Bishop Sand composed music and produced audio.
Subscribe to The Washington Post here.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Hi, I'm Ruby Kramer. This is Post Reports weekend. It's Saturday, August 23rd. I'm a national |
| 0:07.3 | narrative enterprise reporter, and what you're going to hear in a moment is a story I wrote about an |
| 0:12.0 | immigration lawyer, who mostly represents people who have been detained by ICE and sent to rural Louisiana. |
| 0:18.4 | I'll be narrating it. This reporting is part of a Washington Post series called |
| 0:23.2 | Deep Reeds. It's part of our commitment to narrative journalism. I wanted to tell a story in part |
| 0:29.2 | about what actually happens after someone has been detained by ICE. For some detainees, they end up |
| 0:35.3 | in Louisiana, which is home to nine ICE detention facilities. Many of these detainees, they end up in Louisiana, which is home to nine ICE detention facilities. |
| 0:40.0 | Many of these detainees never get legal representation. |
| 0:43.7 | Some of them find Chris Kinnison, who is an immigration lawyer at the center of this story, based in Alexandria, Louisiana. |
| 0:51.2 | He heard from family after family whose loved ones had ended up in the state's |
| 0:55.0 | detention system, and I got a sense of day-to-day life inside the actual facilities where his clients |
| 1:00.3 | were being held. More than anything, I saw an overwhelmed immigration lawyer who was struggling |
| 1:06.0 | to understand what his work was really becoming under this new administration. |
| 1:12.9 | Okay, here's the story. |
| 1:26.6 | Christopher Kinnison tried to find his client on the computer screen, |
| 1:29.2 | but the video feed was too grainy to make out faces. |
| 1:33.5 | What he could see was a small room with white walls, a table, |
| 1:36.9 | and 13 men wearing the same green and white striped jumpsuits, |
| 1:40.5 | all waiting to appear before a judge who had the power to deport them. |
| 1:47.2 | I'm not sure which one he is, Kinnison said, looking closer. The men were being held in Faraday, Louisiana, inside a place called River Correctional Center. All over the country, |
| 1:53.2 | people who had been detained by U.S. immigration and customs enforcement were being sent to |
| 1:57.9 | facilities like this one. A former prison on a rural two-lane highway, in a town of 3,000, |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from The Washington Post, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of The Washington Post and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2025.