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Louisiana

Community Shows Up At ICE Check-Ins To Support Undocumented Immigrants

St. Rose, LA – On June 17, over 20 activists and community members showed up to monitor a building in Saint Rose, Louisiana where ICE called in a large number of people for immigration check-ins. The action was called with a hope to video and deter the ICE kidnappings. “A couple weeks ago, people were getting a text that they have to report to this office at 8 a.m. on Wednesday, June 4. A lot of people were in the waiting room, about 40 people, which is more than usual and seemed really suspicious. It was confirmed that they are detaining people and taking them out back into vans,” Catalina Gallagher, an ICE-watch participant explained.

Gulf Coast Communities Take On Insurers Backing Fossil Fuel Facilities

Promising U.S. “energy dominance,” the Trump administration is moving to accelerate fossil fuel production. Key to this agenda is the approval of liquefied natural gas (LNG) export facilities across Gulf Coast communities that are disproportionately Black, Brown, and low-income, long treated as expendable “sacrifice zones” by the fossil fuel industry. Just recently, on May 23, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) reauthorized the massive CP2 LNG in Cameron Parish, Louisiana, which will be the biggest LNG export facility in the U.S. Local organizers and climate groups have been fighting the expansion of these “methane export facilities” which they say will intensify climate chaos and environmental racism.

Louisiana Gas Tax Break Could Cost Local Communities $2.8 Billion

When Australia’s Woodside Energy Group announced April 29 that it plans to move forward with its Louisiana LNG export terminal, the state hailed the move as the “largest single foreign direct investment and greenfield project in Louisiana history.” It could also create perhaps the largest single local tax giveaway in U.S. history, under a Louisiana law offering corporations property tax breaks worth billions of dollars, a new Sierra Club study shared with DeSmog finds — representing a massive subsidy from Louisiana communities for exporting fossil fuels from the U.S. to Europe and Asia.

Why Protesters Are Being Sent To For-Profit ICE Prison In Rural Louisiana

In recent weeks, students Mahmoud Khalil, Rümeysa Öztürk, and Alireza Doroudi were abducted by ICE and are being held in ICE detention centers in rural Louisiana. Khalil’s powerful statement connects multiple realities that demonstrate how state repression is activated to support the rise of authoritarianism.  That Khalil and others are being sent to detention centers in remote towns across Louisiana is not an accident. Rising authoritarianism requires a police state, and the expansion of prisons, police, and detention centers is extremely profitable. As the current U.S. government disappears people to a brutal prison camp in El Salvador, they are also moving people to rural Louisiana in attempts to disappear people within the United States borders. 

BlueCross/BlueShield: Slow Pay, Low Pay Or No Pay

On a late afternoon in November 2017, Witney Arch told her 1-1/2-year-old son to stop playing and come inside. Upset, he grabbed her right breast when she picked him up. She experienced a shock of pain but did not think it was anything serious. A week later, however, the ache had not subsided. After trips to several doctors, a biopsy revealed that Arch had early-stage breast cancer. Her surgeon told her that it was likely invasive and aggressive. By the end of January, she had made two critical decisions. She would get a double mastectomy. And she wanted her operation at the Center for Restorative Breast Surgery in New Orleans, a medical facility renowned for its highly specialized approach to breast cancer care and reconstruction.

New Orleans Rallies For Mahmoud Khalil Outside ICE Field Office

New Orleans, LA – Around 60 people gathered outside the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) field office in New Orleans to protest the illegal detention of Mahmoud Khalil. Attendees rallied around speakers and chanted as a judge – hours away in rural Jena, Louisiana – would decide if Khalil could be deported for his activism for Palestine. Speaking for the Palestinian Youth Movement, Majdi Jaber said, “This ICE office that we’re outside right now directs operations in all of Louisiana, Arkansas, Mississippi, Tennessee and Alabama. Every day for the last month, these people have chosen to do nothing about Mahmoud’s incarceration.”

Chevron Ordered To Pay More Than $740 Million To Restore Coast

Pointe a la Hache, LA. — Oil company Chevron must pay $744.6 million to restore damage it caused to southeast Louisiana’s coastal wetlands, a jury ruled on Friday following a landmark trial more than a decade in the making. The case was the first of dozens of pending lawsuits to reach trial in Louisiana against the world’s leading oil companies for their role in accelerating land loss along the state’s rapidly disappearing coast. The verdict – which Chevron says it will appeal – could set a precedent leaving other oil and gas firms on the hook for billions of dollars in damages tied to land loss and environmental degradation.

What We Know About The Tufts University Student Kidnapped By ICE

A Tufts University student is being held at an ICE detention facility in Louisiana, and there are growing questions about how she was taken into custody and the timeline of sending her out of state. One major issue is whether federal authorities defied the court order to keep Rumeysa Ozturk in Massachusetts, as it was issued just hours after her arrest Tuesday night. Video shows Ozturk, a Tufts University PhD student from Turkey, screaming as plain-clothes agents surrounded her and grabbed her on a Somerville sidewalk just off campus before taking her away.

Black Prisoners Organize For Dignity In Angola

This Black History Month, Peoples Dispatch is exploring the history of the notorious Louisiana State Penitentiary, the site of centuries of Black struggle—first against slavery, then convict leasing, and now the US prison system, which some label as slavery in the modern day. At the helm of the US’s notorious system of mass incarceration sits Louisiana State Penitentiary. Apart from being the largest maximum-security prison in the United States, this prison, nicknamed “Angola” after the former plantation site that it sits on, is an example of the conditions of modern-day slavery that the US prison system inflicts upon its disproportionately Black incarcerated population.

Students Demand Administration Declare Sanctuary Campus

Baton Rouge, LA – On Friday, February 14, about 30 Louisiana State University (LSU) students and community members rallied in Free Speech Alley to demand that university administration make LSU a sanctuary campus for immigrant students. LSU’s Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) organized the rally to fight back against ICE activity in the Baton Rouge area and Trump's executive order that allows ICE to operate in previously protected places like college campuses, churches and courthouses. Students gathered near the center of Free Speech Alley, their signs turned towards the masses of people in the surrounding area.

Louisiana Issues Arrest Warrant For New York Doctor Over Abortion Pill

A grand jury in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, has indicted and issued arrest warrants for a New York physician who prescribed abortion pills to a pregnant minor in Louisiana, which has one of the strictest abortion bans in the country. The case directly targets the most common abortion method in the U.S. and challenges protections for out-of-state providers in Democratic-led states. In addition to physician Margaret Carpenter and her company, Nightingale Medical, PC, the grand jury unanimously issued an indictment and an arrest warrant for the minor’s mother.

Amid Bad News For Workers, Win In New Orleans Offers Hope

There’s a little bit of hope in the city, even with grim election results and a grimmer start to the year. A Workers’ Bill of Rights was overwhelmingly approved by voters on Election Day. More than 80% of those who cast a ballot voted to enshrine workers’ rights in the city’s Home Rule charter, the first step in the process of building a real framework for enforcing higher minimum wages, employer-provided healthcare, paid family and sick leave, vacation time and the right to organize. In a state where President Donald Trump won 60% of the vote and where a far-right legislature and governor have preempted many of the possibilities for local action, the Workers’ Bill of Rights offers a blueprint for forward motion under conservative governance.

Community Members Oppose Motion At Consent Decree Hearing

New Orleans, LA – On Tuesday, December 17, community organizations and New Orleanians impacted by police misconduct or police violence united at the Consent Decree Fairness Hearing to demand that Judge Susie Morgan rule against the New Orleans Police Department sustainment plan. The consent decree is the federal oversight instituted in 2013. That year, the Department of Justice found the NOPD to be practicing unlawful misconduct and unconstitutional policing. Different community groups rallied outside against the motion. The people came together around five points of unity.

Developers Eye Louisiana, Texas For Offshore Carbon Storage

The fishers in Gulf of Mexico waters off Cameron Parish, Louisiana, estimate their catch has fallen catastrophically from 1 million tons a season to 150,000 tons since the first liquefied natural gas terminal in the parish began operating eight years ago. Now, a new industry is being developed in the waters that were once the most productive grounds in the nation for fish, shrimp and oysters. A company called OnStream CO2 is developing the GeoDura hub, which it says could hold millions of tons of carbon dioxide captured from fossil fuel industries, including LNG terminals, a mile or more below the waters off Cameron Parish’s shores.

A History Of Success Drives The Ongoing Struggle To Clean Up Cancer Alley

Two days after the election, I left on a research trip to Mississippi and Louisiana. I joined four others from my church in Yarmouth, Maine. Our purpose was to witness and learn about the struggle for civil and environmental rights in a region known as “Cancer Alley.” This 85-mile stretch of the Mississippi — between Baton Rouge and New Orleans — is home to 150 petrochemical plants, all along the river. It is also home to many working-class people, a majority of them Black. The first thing you notice are the huge refineries. Tall smokestacks spew toxic chemicals and methane flares light up the sky. The scale of industrialization is hard to imagine — there are miles and miles of factories and chemical plants.

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