Lasalle Corrections: The Accountability Shell Game
Inside the multimillion-dollar family business benefiting from the ICE expansion while trying to shield itself from accountability.
Hunterbrook Media’s investment affiliate, Hunterbrook Capital, does not have any positions related to this article at the time of publication. Positions may change at any time. Full disclosures on our website.
By: Wendy Nardi, Nick Chrastil, Michelle Cera
Editor: Jim Impoco, Vikas Kumar
On October 21, 2025, at 9:44 a.m. local time, a single-engine Cirrus SR22 fell from the sky.
Heading to the Ruston, Louisiana, airport, the pilot radioed for another approach and said he was “hand-flying” the plane.
That was the last communication. The plane looped around the dense woods, banked left, hit a 60-foot tree, and crashed, gouging a trough in the ground and bursting into flames.
The plane was registered to Louisiana private prison company LaSalle Management, and flying it was Rodney Cooper, who helped run Texas corrections before becoming LaSalle’s executive director.
Local Sheriff Andy Brown later told reporters Cooper had been on his way to work. “Wasn’t much left of the plane,” Brown said.
For years, Cooper had been the public face of LaSalle. When lawmakers demanded answers about abuses in private prisons, Cooper was the one who showed up on Capitol Hill. His death brought the family pulling the strings out from the background. Steering the company all along was Billy McConnell, a quiet patriarch who co-founded LaSalle and, by his own account, “oversees all aspects of LaSalle’s operations.”
While Cooper took some public heat, McConnell and his family quietly expanded their privately held, multimillion-dollar correctional empire. Last September, ICE set up a high-profile detention wing nicknamed the Louisiana Lockup at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. LaSalle bagged the contract, a deal that cemented its position as a state favorite and a beneficiary of the Trump administration’s $113.5 billion ICE detention push.
Today, ICE money is turbocharging LaSalle’s operations. Using complex intergovernmental service agreements, LaSalle partners with small-town sheriffs and rural municipalities to run multijurisdictional prisons that operate with little oversight.
Sometimes LaSalle builds the prison from scratch; other times it just assumes operational control. It pockets profits — and often restricts access to the prison complex.
And people are dying in its custody.1
A monthslong Hunterbrook Media investigation reveals this secretive family has built a liability moat — a sprawling multimillion-dollar private prison enterprise hidden behind nearly 80 opaque LLCs that we could identify. Among our key findings:
Opacity: Unlike publicly traded competitors CoreCivic ($CXW) and The GEO Group ($GEO), LaSalle is privately held and resists disclosing financial data. When families sue over allegedly preventable inmate deaths, LaSalle’s lawyers claim “LaSalle Corrections” is a mere “trade name,” trapping legal claims inside the local LLCs that actually own or run facilities and limiting claimants’ ability to hold the people in charge to account.
Self-Dealing and Vertical Integration: The family often captures additional revenue by subcontracting services such as prison commissary, phone systems, and transport to their own side companies.
Deep Political Entrenchment: Through campaign contributions and lobbying, the family has built an influence network from rural Louisiana all the way to Capitol Hill.
Expanding into High-Risk ICE Operations: Despite a spate of oversight failures and recent detainee deaths, LaSalle is expanding its footprint, taking over specialized ICE facilities, including a controversial new staging site at England Airpark for families and unaccompanied children.
By trapping legal accountability inside individual LLCs while routing profits through a web of family-owned holding companies, LaSalle has constructed what amounts to a legal and physical blackout zone. “If you can just create some minor differences,” Peter Oh, a business law professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, told Hunterbrook in an interview, “it’s enough basically to create this wall of limited liability that partitions all the assets and liabilities away.”
THE SHELL GAME
Erik Carlson, a 29-year-old pretrial detainee, was incarcerated at the LaSalle Correctional Center in Olla, Louisiana. After his death on January 25, 2025, his family filed a federal lawsuit alleging he died from complications of strep throat that prison staff failed to treat. The lawsuit names LaSalle Corrections, LaSalle Management Company, and the LaSalle Correctional Center among the defendants, calling them “LaSalle.”
LaSalle lawyers fought back. In a brief filed in April, they sought to have the case dismissed because specific facts had not been alleged against each LLC separately. Their claim? That the plaintiffs’ legal team “impermissibly group three separate defendants together and make collective allegations against that group.” It’s a familiar move for LaSalle attorneys.
LaSalle Corrections holds itself out to the public as a family-operated private prison company headquartered in Louisiana. According to its website, LaSalle “and its affiliates” manage 18 corrections facilities in several states that can house over 13,000 people. News outlets refer to it as a company, and its employees say they work for one.
But when LaSalle is sued, say, for an allegedly preventable death at one of its facilities, its lawyers fight the notion that the organization is an integrated whole. They claim that “LaSalle Corrections” is just a trade name “widely used to refer to various LaSalle-branded entities,” a loose set of independent LLCs with seemingly with no centralized oversight or parent entity that can be held responsible.
The defense is built into LaSalle’s corporate architecture. When LaSalle gets a contract to manage a new facility, it often creates a whole new LLC. For instance, when ICE tapped LaSalle to operate the immigration detention facility within the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, LaSalle officials created a brand-new company called the ICE 47 Processing Center LLC to hold the contract.
By structuring LaSalle as a loose group of LLCs, the company’s owners obtain liability protection similar to that of a corporation. The arrangement brings other benefits, too: LLCs use pass-through taxation, meaning income flows to owners’ personal returns instead of being taxed at the LLC level first. “I think the tax advantages for them are probably significant,” Oh told Hunterbrook.
And because state laws grant owners wide latitude in drafting LLC operating agreements, those documents can be written however the owners prefer.
“You can shape it however you want,” Oh said. “You could actually create an LLC and say there are no fiduciary duties whatsoever.”
Of course, many organizations use LLCs to limit liability; as the term “limited liability company” suggests, that’s one of the primary reasons this type of entity exists. But LaSalle is not just any organization: Its core business is incarceration. Based on Hunterbrook’s review of a decade of litigation, LaSalle has regularly used its opaque operating structure to avoid liability and prevent plaintiffs from getting insight into the broader organization. The upshot: Plaintiffs don’t know whom to sue, and the opacity complicates discovery into the company’s structure and finances. Theoretically at least, the LLC structure could even let LaSalle strip assets from individual entities, blocking any meaningful financial recovery or accountability.
At first, LaSalle might seek to have a case dismissed, alleging the plaintiff named the wrong entity. The company also resists discovery that would give plaintiffs insight into its inner workings. Those are temporary hurdles plaintiffs have to overcome. But even when a plaintiff sues the right party, we found, LaSalle has tried to confine liability to the entity that operates the facility.
Dustin Rowland sued after being denied medical care for a hernia while in custody at the LaSalle-run Fannin County Detention Center in Texas. LaSalle tried to get the lawsuit dismissed because Rowland had failed to name another LLC, LaSalle Corrections West, that held the contract to operate the jail.
In response to the motion to dismiss, Rowland’s lawyer wrote, “it is obvious that LaSalle Corrections proudly claims to be one enterprise,”2 noting that nowhere in the company’s marketing is there a disclaimer that it is “actually a conglomeration of independent corporations.”
The family of Jaleen Anderson, who died in 2024 after being held at LaSalle Correctional Center in Olla, Louisiana, hit the same wall. In a motion to compel discovery3 regarding LaSalle’s corporate structure, the lawyers wrote, “LaSalle has repeatedly evaded this discovery.”
“They don’t say exactly what each corporation does in a very complex system … all operating out of this Ruston headquarters,” a lawyer for Anderson’s family said, as news outlet The Advocate reported on June 23. “Can these folks just sit here and just say, ‘You know, this man died, but you didn’t exactly name the right corporate entity, and therefore you’re out of luck?’”
The Anderson legal team has admitted that including LaSalle Corrections LLC, the trade name, as a defendant was a mistake. “The difficulty is that Plaintiffs do not yet know the identity of the entity or entities that should be named,” they said. “That is not for lack of trying.”
Plaintiffs who clear the procedural hurdles face a potentially bigger problem. LaSalle executives have testified that a separate entity, LaSalle Management, handles what they call “back office” duties for the various LLCs. These duties include payroll, human resources support, accounting, and legal services. They also include “plans for future operations” and “trying to collect bills,” McConnell testified last October. Theoretically, the company could move money into a specific LLC only as needed for a particular expense.
“We’re just going to keep moving all the different assets around,” Oh hypothesized, speaking generally about an organization with a complex LLC structure, not specifically about LaSalle. “Even if you do end up actually catching us, what’s going to happen is that we’re just going to tell you that’s fine. That’s the judgment, but the money isn’t there.” Oh described such hypothetical circumstances as “a red flag which says, ‘look this company was set up right only for the purposes of being a shell.’”
Louisiana secretary of state registrations belie the notion that all of these LLCs tied to the family are unrelated entities. The prison business LaSalle Corrections, for example, lists WMC Enterprises as a member, and WMC lists McConnell Southeast Holdings as a member. LaSalle Corrections and WMC Enterprises both identify William K. McConnell as the registered agent, with an address of 192 Bastille Lane, Ruston, Louisiana.
McConnell Southeast Holdings is also a member of the prison-services firms Correct Solutions and Correct Commissary, as well as low-income housing developer M&T Development. Similarly named McConnell Southeast Corrections is a member of prison LLCs LaSalle runs for ICE: Winn Correctional Center LLC, River Correctional Center LLC, Jackson Correctional Center LLC, and Richwood Correctional Center LLC. It’s also a member of LaSalle Management. But McConnell Southeast Corrections itself leads back to a single manager and registered agent, William K. McConnell, at the same 192 Bastille Lane address.
Despite the complex structure, documents obtained by Hunterbrook through public records requests appear to indicate that decisions come down from the top and that problems at the sites are reported upward.
For all the legal posturing, in other words, LaSalle is run by the family.4
“They are closely held and it is top-down. I don’t care what kind of image they try to project. They’re very tightly controlled,” Tom Aswell, whose public interest blog Louisiana Voice has covered LaSalle Corrections, opined to Hunterbrook.
The tells aren’t hard to find. The contract McConnell signed for the ICE 47 Processing Center LLC last August, for example, uses the 192 Bastille Lane address and contact email “billy@lasallecorrections.com.”
Similarly, a contract between the Jackson Parish sheriff’s office and “Jackson Correctional Center LLC” not only lists the 192 Bastille Lane address but also states that the LLC “agrees to arrange for housing for Jackson Parish pre-trial inmates at the LaSalle Correctional Center or any other facility managed by LaSalle Management Company, L.L.C.”
Another example: In a 2023 proposal to run the Jefferson County Downtown Jail in Texas, Billy McConnell described the company’s legal structure, saying LaSalle Corrections operated “under the following names: LaSalle Management Company, L.L.C., Southwestern Correctional, LLC, and LaSalle Southeast LLC with dba LaSalle Corrections.” The “Executive Summary” says LaSalle Corrections is “owned by William K. McConnell, Patrick H. Temple and their family members.”
“William (Billy) K. McConnell is Managing Partner of LaSalle Corrections and as such is the person responsible for making decisions as to matters relating to the referenced solicitation,” the proposal states.5
The contract to run the jail was awarded to LaSalle Corrections VI dba LaSalle Corrections.
Earlier, a Correct Solutions job bid stated that McConnell “oversees all aspects of LaSalle’s operations.”
Lately, the company’s legal armor has begun to show cracks. Last fall, a jury rejected LaSalle’s portrayal of itself as a collection of disparate entities and returned what lawyers for the plaintiffs called the largest award against a private prison company. Erie Moore, Sr., died after injuries received at the Richwood Correctional Center, run by the family’s Richwood Correctional Center LLC,6 and Moore’s family sued. The prison was a jail then but has since become an ICE detention facility. The jury awarded Moore’s family more than $40 million in damages and found that the companies were “a single integrated enterprise.”
“I have to feel like it’s a real stunning knockout punch to them,” Oh told Hunterbrook. “We know that you’re at the center of it and all of these different companies are all the same.”
After the jury returned its verdict in the Moore case, LaSalle tried to have it thrown out, claiming the evidence presented was “superficial.” In May, the judge reduced the award. Both sides have filed notices of appeal to the Fifth Circuit.
“A court has basically taken the step to say you can form as many LLCs as you want, but we’ve seen through what you are doing,” Oh told Hunterbrook.. As a result, “whatever liabilities are incurred by one LLC is going to apply to you,” he said. It’s possible “their house of cards is about to collapse.”
BUILDING THE BLACKOUT ZONE
In October 2025, Nora Ahmed, legal director of the ACLU of Louisiana, drove to LaSalle’s Jackson Parish Correctional Center with a court order to free a detainee, she told Hunterbrook in an interview. The prison was hours from her office, and she arrived late in the day. Instead of honoring the order, LaSalle staff kicked her off the property, she said. The ACLU of Louisiana posted a video about the incident to its Instagram page.
ICE didn’t clear it up until the next day, Ahmed told Hunterbrook. She said delays in processing releases are common. “If you come to Louisiana,” she said, “you come here to disappear.”
Geographic isolation forms the outer wall of the company’s accountability moat.
Four dedicated ICE prisons LaSalle runs — theWinn Correctional Center, Richwood Correctional Center, River Correctional Center, and Jackson Parish Correctional Center — sit in northern and central Louisiana, far from major cities. Camp 57 at Angola, nicknamed the Louisiana Lockup, is to the southeast, in a building at the notorious Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. Based on the July 9 average daily population totals at Trac Reports, Louisiana held about 7,680 ICE detainees, and LaSalle-run sites accounted for roughly 56% of that total, more than any other private prison company.
Inside the moat, conditions can be miserable.
Carla Hall, a nurse who worked at the Jackson Parish Correctional Center, told Hunterbrook in an interview that the prison had been crowded. “They were getting paid by the head,” Hall said. Sometimes “the facility officer had to come to help go through the intake process because it was so many coming in at one time.” Hall sued LaSalle for employment discrimination in 2021. Her case was dismissed with prejudice.
In 2020, the Government Accountability Project, a nonprofit that defends whistleblowers, wrote to Congress condemning the “ongoing gross mismanagement, dangerous practices, and compliance failures” at facilities like Richwood. Cooper was called before Congress to respond. “These deaths and illnesses were likely caused by LaSalle mismanagement,” read the GAP letter, which was entered into the Congressional record. It alleged that LaSalle failed to follow COVID-19 protocols or report or acknowledge deaths.7
Sources Hunterbrook spoke with emphasized that company leadership should be distinguished from the rank-and-file LaSalle employees, for whom the job could be an economic lifeline. “I think there are some people who don’t like the system, but then they choose that they’re going to be kind to people,” said Ahmed, who has visited LaSalle’s ICE prisons in Louisiana. “And then they know that there are other people who work there who are unkind to people.”
A former employee told Hunterbrook, on condition of anonymity, that when they worked at a LaSalle prison in 2021, they’d been properly trained. They worked nights as a certified nursing assistant and then a correctional officer. They described work culture as “one of the weaker points.”
Hall said of her time at Jackson Parish Correctional Center, “You had some good guards there and some good nurses.”
ICE has met with LaSalle repeatedly to discuss issues with its various operations — five times we found in 2024 alone. Those meetings do not appear to have led to meaningful changes in LaSalle’s operations.8
NBC News reported in July 2025 that detainees were going hungry at Winn Correctional Center, among other sites. In October 2025, USA Today reported that LaSalle served ICE detainees at Richwood food that was rancid or insufficient.
Then in June 2026, the Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General issued a damning report after a surprise inspection. Fridges at Winn were warm inside; water pooled on the floor; legal resources weren’t always clearly accessible; recordings of incidents had crucial gaps; and staff used “prohibited techniques,” including in one instance in which an officer stabbed a detainee in the thumb with a pen while trying to get them back into their cell. Two days after the report, Mamuka Artmeladze died at Winn, the “second detainee death in less than 2 months,” the AP reported, following the death in April of Alejandro Cabrera Clemente.
“This cannot be who we are,” U.S. Rep. Mark DeSaulnier said in a Facebook post after an ICE detainee lost her baby, possibly from a lack of prenatal care at Richwood.
It appears that LaSalle’s board of directors won’t be taking up any of these urgent matters. That’s because we weren’t able to find evidence of a board at all.
In a 2024 deposition, the late Executive Director Rodney Cooper was asked, “Do you report to a board of directors?” He said no and went on, “I’m not aware of a board of directors.”
Earlier that year, though, when deposed for a different lawsuit, he said he reported to “the board of people, I guess, that have LaSalle Corrections.” When asked who was on the board, he said he didn’t know. But he guessed Billy McConnell was on it.9
What does McConnell make of all the criticism? “What somebody else thinks about Billy McConnell compared with what God thinks of Billy McConnell is almost irrelevant,” McConnell told USA Today in 2019.
It seems possible McConnell answers to no one — at least, no one on earth.10
MEET THE MCCONNELLS
“Managing a detention center requires a dynamic mix of special skills and experience.” — LaSalle Corrections contract proposal
“I’m not running a nonprofit.” — Clay McConnell, 2012, The Times-Picayune
Billy McConnell stood at the microphone on May 23, 2026, as keynote speaker for commencement at his alma mater, Louisiana Tech University. He wore a suit and tie with a golden cross hanging from his neck. He told the story of how his grandfather, a third-grader, also named Billy, was mocked for going to school barefoot. “He left that classroom that day embarrassed and humiliated and never returned,” McConnell told the graduating students. “He lived the rest of his life without a formal education.”
“And yet,” McConnell went on, “as I sat in his lap, he would tell me he was a millionaire” because he valued his family. McConnell also paid tribute to the late Rodney Cooper, describing him as “a great man.”
Billy McConnell remains the family patriarch. He founded and still appears to be involved in running the family business, which united his family with that of his late co-founder and brother-in-law, Patrick H. Temple. The family business headquarters appears to be 192 Bastille Lane in Ruston, Louisiana, with additional offices next door at 182 Bastille Lane. Correct Solutions is there, along with KPL LLC. The LaSalle empire of businesses also use addresses at 1910 and 1936 Farmerville Highway in Ruston, and more out of state. In 2024, LaSalle Regional Warden James McCormick said the corporate office was “the office for all of LaSalle’s operations combined.” LaSalle Management owns the property at 192 Bastille Lane, according to the Lincoln Parish Assessor’s Office.11
McConnell, now in his late 70s, grew up in rural Rayville, a northern Louisiana town of about 3,000 people. He attended Louisiana Tech, in Ruston, where he studied engineering, and where his college yearbooks show an undergrad with wavy hair and glasses. He joined a fraternity, Sigma Nu’s Eta Zeta chapter, as well as academic honor societies and the Wesley Foundation, a student organization that was affiliated with the United Methodist Church.
He went to work for Exxon and trained as a lawyer, then changed course to run his father’s construction business. From there, the family made the leap into prisons. McConnell co-founded LaSalle Corrections in 1997. “We realized that prisons are like nursing homes,” his son, Clay McConnell, told The Times-Picayune in 2012. “You need occupancy to be high. You have to treat people fairly and run a good ship, but run it like a business, watch food costs, employee costs.”
At first, the business apparently had a selling point: It showed a commitment to substance abuse treatment and re-entry programming, Robert Hanser, an associate professor at the University of Louisiana at Monroe, told Hunterbrook in an interview. Hanser worked with LaSalle’s Blue Walters substance abuse and re-entry program at Richwood Correctional Center around that time and became LaSalle’s director of offender programming. “They were really proud of that program,” Hanser said. “Sometimes I could go to them and say look I really want to do this, that, or the other, and this is where I think it’ll really help out,” he said. “They have no pecuniary interest whatsoever and they just go ahead and say, we can float that.”
LaSalle established relationships with local law enforcement. Johnny Creed, chief of operations for LaSalle Management, said in a 2018 deposition that he drove all over Louisiana talking to sheriffs who might need extra jail space and help “filling beds.” “The visit might be started off with a phone call,” Creed recalled. “I heard, you know, that a certain parish had incarcerated persons, something or other. I’d get up in the morning, you know, and take off.”
But eventually, LaSalle came to another fork in the road. ICE was paying rates several times what Louisiana paid to house prisoners. In 2019, LaSalle converted four major Louisiana prisons it ran into ICE detention centers: Winn, River, Jackson Parish, Richwood.
It also moved into prison-related services that are moneymakers in their own right. Correct Solutions Group offers payment services, phone services, tablets and kiosks, and commissary, as well as an “offender management system” and GPS tracking, according to the website.12 LaSalle Corrections offers transportation services, including with armed guards; commissary; construction; and administrative services.
LaSalle was becoming vertically integrated, capturing additional revenue flowing into the private prisons it ran through other companies the family owned.
A LinkedIn profile for Clay McConnell identifies him as “Managing Director at LaSalle Management.” He appears online as a religious speaker13 and also posts about hunting ducks. His name appears on company registrations for very few of the family LLCs.
But another name has been appearing on active registrations: Wesley McConnell, Clay’s brother. Wesley is a licensed CPA and real estate agent, and a principal partner of Whitetail Properties Real Estate, which sells hunting land. His LinkedIn profile reads “Co-Owner at LaSalle Corrections.” Wesley McConnell is listed as a SAM.gov contact for LaSalle Corrections V (which received a major DHS contract in May 2025), as well as LaSalle Corrections VI and McConnell Southeast Holdings. He is also president of the LaSalle Family Foundation, the contractor for a new ICE site at the England Airpark in Alexandria, LA.
He is also listed as a director of the private Guaranty Bank & Trust Co. of Delhi, Louisiana, according to the Louisiana Office of Financial Institutions. The bank’s annual report, signed March 7, 2025, shows the family owns about 11% of the bank’s shares. And the bank appears to hold accounts for some of their prison-related LLCs: It has come up in court as a bank used by Correct Solutions and possibly by LaSalle Management.14
MONEY MATTERS
LaSalle’s ICE contracts often result from intergovernmental service agreements, or IGSAs, that ICE sets up with state or local government agencies. IGSAs are a mainstay of ICE’s work with private prison contractors, according to the Government Accountability Office.
The agreement is a three-way deal: ICE signs an IGSA with a local government agency, and that agency signs a separate contract with the prison company.
And the local partners get paid. Under a contract obtained through a public records request, for example, LaSalle’s Jackson Correctional Center LLC (“JCC” in legal documents) agreed to pay the sheriff’s office a sponsor fee of $13,333.33 a month, or $160,000 a year, plus a per diem of $1.59 for each detainee. At 1,037 detainees in July, according to a detentionreports.com estimate, that would be about $600,000 a year more, bringing the total to almost $800,000 for the year. In an area with a limited tax base, such sponsorship fees can provide a significant part of the law enforcement budget.
That’s not the only way the family enterprise sends money flowing.
A handwritten note across the top of a lobbying disclosure form in a 2023 job bid stated, “LaSalle does not have any lobbying activity.” The page was signed by LaSalle Corrections Chief Financial Officer Tim Kurpiewski. The LLC web makes Kurpiewski’s denial possible: No entity named “LaSalle Corrections” needs to appear on a disclosure.
And yet Hunterbrook found extensive records of family entities lobbying in multiple states. LaSalle Corrections lobbied under its own name in Louisiana in 2014, and in Alaska in 2019 and 2020, according to state disclosures reviewed by Hunterbrook. LaSalle Corrections Management has lobbied in Arkansas.
Prison-related entity Correct Solutions has paid for dinner parties for sheriffs and their employees at the Arkansas Sheriffs’ Association Winter Conference — $21,809.39 in 2025 and $10,959.84 in 2026, according to ethics disclosures with the Arkansas secretary of state. Correct Solutions is listed as a client on the Gilmore website and has lobbied in Colorado, in Louisiana, and at the federal level, through Monument Advocacy.
Besides paying lobbyists, the McConnell family and its businesses keep money flowing through campaign contributions at the national, state, and local levels, Hunterbrook found. They give heavily, year after year, to candidates up and down the ballot: local sheriffs, governors, state senators and representatives, judges, district attorneys, the U.S. president, PACs, and other organizations.15
LaSalle Management, Correct Solutions, and the Jackson Parish Correctional Center, LaSalle Correctional Center, Richwood Correctional Center, and Winn Correctional Center have donated to the campaign of Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry: almost $45,000 from 2021 to 2025, based on Hunterbrook’s investigation. Five different LLCs each contributed $5,000 to the campaign on the same day, May 24, 2023.
In June 2025, Landry appointed Billy McConnell to the Louisiana Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Criminal Justice as a “Person having Vital Concern w/ LCLE.” McConnell had apparently been part of Landry’s transition team, too, according to James LeBlanc, former secretary of the state Department of Public Safety and Corrections, who in a 2024 deposition said he’d met with McConnell in that capacity.
Meanwhile, contributions by family prison-related businesses have flowed to sheriffs, elected officials LaSalle does business with. In a typical scenario, the sheriff signs an IGSA with ICE and then has discretion over which prison company will operate the site.
Multiple Louisiana sheriffs have received contributions from McConnell LLCs, according to the Louisiana campaign finance portal. On September 4, 2023, River Correctional Center donated $2,500 to a local sheriff’s campaign. The very next day, so did LaSalle Management.
The money reaches all the way to the federal level. In Federal Election Commission records, family members who listed LaSalle entities as their employer gave generously to politicians and political groups.
Contributions also went to the war chest of U.S. Congressman Clay Higgins, a Republican from Louisiana who received tens of thousands of dollars from the McConnells between 2020 and 2025 through “Captain Higgins for Congress,” the “Higgins Victory Committee,” and his affiliated Redemption PAC. Toward the end of that time, LaSalle was slated for expansion at the Airpark.
THE AIRPARK
“If we want AEX to be known as Auschwitz International Airport, just keep going.” Angela Hayes, a local resident, stood at the microphone and said she “hadn’t planned on speaking” but felt that a private company profiting from the new family and children’s deportation staging facility ICE plans at the Airpark would be “morally reprehensible.” The moment was captured on a video posted to the website of the England Airpark board, officially named the England Economic and Industrial Development District, or EEIDD, on March 26.
“It’s morally repugnant,” said Dr. David Holcombe, medical director of the Community Healthworx, at the meeting. “I do immigration exams for legal citizens and some that are prisoners,” he said. “They are in terrible shape. They’re in total distress. They’ve been picked up all over the United States and dumped here.”
ICE is calling the new site a “staging area,” and the LaSalle Family Foundation of Ruston, Louisiana, is the contractor, the AP reported July 6. Airpark officials say it’s for self-deporting families and unaccompanied children.
Local residents and human rights activists have been protesting the new facility. On July 31, the National Immigration Project and other organizations published an open letter to the EEIDD board of commissioners, asking them to cancel contracts for the site. “This Is a Detention Center Operating as a Punitive Carceral Facility—Not a Residential Humanitarian Center,” the letter read. It went on, “The proposed facility is slated to be operated by the LaSalle Family Foundation, an organization with direct ties to LaSalle Corrections, a private prison company repeatedly criticized for allegations of abuse, retaliation, and neglect.”
That same day, Airpark officials published an open letter in local news outlet The Town Talk responding to recent reporting about the Airpark, including the new ICE site. “Facilities associated with Immigration and Customs Enforcement are operated by independent entities under federal oversight, not by the EEIDD,” the letter reads. “Likewise, the proposed self-deporting migrant family processing center would be operated by an independent tenant. According to information provided by the prospective operator, the facility is intended to function as a short-term processing center, not a prison, as some have incorrectly claimed.”
ICE already runs what has been reported as its main U.S. deportation hub at the Airpark. The site falls under the oversight of the ICE New Orleans field office.
“You can hear it everywhere. You can hear these big planes peeling out, right?” Holcombe told Hunterbrook in an interview. “Everybody in the community knows it’s happening.”
Activists have denounced the site’s lack of transparency for years. In a 2023 FOIA request to ICE, Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights and the ACLU of Louisiana, along with the New York Civil Liberties Union, said the site was being called a “black box” and demanded a count of how many people were inside the building. “ICE frequently holds detainees at Alexandria for extended periods,” the request read, “without adequate medical care, disability accommodations, and language access services.”16 That year, a Prison Rape Elimination Act auditor found the Alexandria staging facility failed to comply with 13 standards that required corrective action.
The next year, LaSalle signed the lease for a building right on the tarmac. It’s a nondescript structure at 1113 Billy Mitchell Blvd., based on the Airpark website. The company helps out at the GEO site, Airpark Deputy Director David Broussard told the board last April.
The lease said LaSalle planned to add “a new portico on the tarmac side of the Leased Premises.”
Documents the Airpark provided in response to a public records request suggest LaSalle had permission to temporarily hold people inside the building it rents, including for booking and intake, or “processing.” There are indications in the contract that it could be used to house and ultimately deport immigrants. First, section 3.1 details the use of the leased premises and states that the premises should be used as a “temporary holding” facility “providing immigration transport services to the U.S. Government.”
Second, the Airpark is required to provide LaSalle with access to the premises 24/7/365 for LaSalle’s “employees, agents, invitees,” and importantly, “individuals in Lessee’s custody.”
Finally, LaSalle planned to renovate the facility to add “security features, including a security gate and sally port area.” A sally port is a “security vestibule” often used for prisons and jails to control access. It sets up a series of secure doors, only one of which opens at a time.
An informational slide with the ICE logo at the top, also provided by the England Airpark, reads: “LaSalle Corrections Transport: $5 Million Dollar investment in building renovations for a processing facility at England Airpark.” It’s unclear what “processing” may involve. But the company said it will have 75 employees at the “England Airpark facility,” open every day of the year.
The LaSalle Corrections name and logo are already on the Airpark’s “tenants” page.
The Airpark is run by the England Economic and Industrial Development District, built on the site of a former military base that is now its own political entity. Amid controversy over a proposed data center at the Airpark, and public protests about ICE, the board approved LaSalle’s deal for the new site earlier this spring. The parcels involved are a barracks at 1603 Frank Luke Blvd. and an office building at 1406 Van Gossen Drive, on either side of the main road leading into the airport, according to Google Maps, plus about 10 acres of property, according to the video posted of the February board meeting.
LaSalle Corrections will run the new facility, the AP reported July 6,17 while the LaSalle Family Foundation of Ruston, Louisiana, has a cooperative endeavor agreement with the Airpark for the site, the Airpark confirmed. The nonprofit foundation said on its 2024 IRS Form 990-PF that it sends chaplains into LaSalle prisons. Its officers and directors include Billy McConnell, Clay McConnell, and Wesley McConnell, who also serves as president and receives grant applications at his LaSalle Corrections email address.
“The LaSalle group has a very sinister reputation,” Holcombe told Hunterbrook in an interview.
On a recent visit, the Airpark resembled a suburban housing development, with well-maintained lawns, clean streets, and a golf course. Decorative statues of Air Force fighter jets stood in the grassy medians. But down a few side streets near the Alexandria International Airport was a fenced-off area of tarmac with trucks, buses, and groups of people being loaded onto planes. Signs warned: “No Stopping. No Standing. No Parking.”
Sen. Ron Wyden, who is on the Senate Finance Committee, complained about the opacity surrounding the new LaSalle site in a June 3 letter to the Administration for Children & Families. “A federal facility designed to hold children and families in federal custody cannot be stood up in secrecy,” he wrote, noting the absence of public announcements or licensing steps. “Whatever ACF is preparing to do at Alexandria, the Finance Committee, the public, and the children themselves have a right to know about it.”
“It’s a prison,” Frances Kelley, who works with Louisiana Advocates for Immigrants in Detention, a volunteer organization that assists immigrants in detention and their families, told Hunterbrook in an interview.
“The people that are going to be in the detention center at the airport are going to be already in ICE custody and they’re going to be choosing to be there versus fighting their case in immigration court,” Kelley said. “And if they were fighting their case in immigration court, they would be detained the entire time. So that’s the real choice that they’re making.”
“They’re not going to let people walk out of that building,” Kelley said. “ICE does not let people go, especially now. They don’t let people go.”
Based on videos posted to the England Airpark website, Executive Director Ralph Hennessy and others had been meeting with federal officials since at least 2024 to discuss expanding the roles of ICE and LaSalle at the Airpark. In an email to Hunterbrook, Hennessy explained that the Airpark has “not led any efforts to expand ICE or LaSalle’s presence here. We have merely responded to their requests to expand their operations at the airpark.”
In a May 20, 2024, email Hunterbrook obtained through a public records request, Broussard told Hennessy, “Ralph, Attached is the piece we brought and left with Cong. Higgins staffer,” with the 2024 GEO-LaSalle document attached. Outlining points about the site, he said, “GEO handles housing and ground transportation not flights,” and “LaSalle also only houses and transports. Operates in multiple states.” He emphasized, “No children or women housed at GEO or LaSalle facilities at England. Women transported same day from other facilities and moved directly to planes. No children are processed or detained at anytime.”
He assured Hennessy that detainees were only convicted felons who had already been adjudicated and “come in from all parts of the country” for a 72-hour stay at most. “ASF has no barbed or razor wire,” he wrote, referring to the Alexandria Staging Facility. “Facility blends with activities on ramp.”
On a May 23, 2024, video, Hennessy told the board his team had met with Higgins’ staff in Washington, D.C. “regarding the ICE facility and The GEO Group and LaSalle and what we have here, because he sits on Homeland Security. And it’s something that we felt like he should be interested in … even though we’re not in his district.”
Higgins recommended meeting with Homeland Security Committee staff, Hennessy said. “We walked into a room with eight to 10 people, with everyone from the Coast Guard to Border Patrol and Customs and a number of other entities within Homeland Security,” Hennessy told the board, as he confirmed in an email to Hunterbrook. “They were very intrigued. Uh, they liked hearing what we had to say. They asked a lot of questions.”
By January 30, 2025, Hennessy reported that he’d been advised, “There’s a possibility that the operations here could double.”
Hennessy told the board, “We met with Congressman Higgins and his staff while we were in D.C. last week and and Congressman Higgins would love to flow everything through AEX. Why Congressman Higgins? Because he’s on Homeland Security and that’s that’s what oversees that. He was pretty blunt and said, ‘Look, I if I get my way, you all are going to get sick and tired of everything coming to Alexandria and you’re going to call and beg me to turn it off.’”18 In an email to Hunterbrook, Hennessy said that this was “something he mentioned to me at a social event,” and pointed out that Higgins is “no longer on Homeland Security.”
Given the competition between companies for ICE money, Hennessy said, they’d consulted with Higgins so he could “make sure that flows here instead of some of these other states.” He told the board, “LaSalle has their own prison network that they [store] prisoners there. They move them here by bus, put them on the airplanes with the GEO prison.” In an email to Hunterbrook, Hennessy said that he had “crossed paths with” Higgins at a social event but had meetings only with his staff.
At an April 24, 2025, meeting, based on the video, Airpark Deputy Director David Broussard told the board, “LaSalle Corrections, which is out here at the Airpark and of course supports the GEO ICE cluster that’s happening here,” had submitted a proposal for a major new project to the DHS that could involve multiple buildings. “We’re kind of in the wait and see mode,” he said. Meeting minutes confirmed LaSalle was looking to expand.
Broussard reiterated on November 20, 2025, “I’ve been working on a pretty, uh, good expansion project for LaSalle Corrections who currently leases a building on the flight line.” By January 22, the Airpark and LaSalle were apparently “putting together a proposal packet to go to ICE for their approval,” Hennessy said.
At a February 26, 2026, board meeting, Hennessy confirmed LaSalle’s presence at the staging area, explaining the new family site’s deportation planes would be “the flights that, that are already, um, being utilized by the GEO Group and LaSalle for, for the other deportations.”
Discussions of the new family site continued this spring.
We reached out to LaSalle executives for comment about the findings in our article. Senior Corporate Counsel Leah Sumrall wrote back, “We appreciate your interest in our organization and the work we do. Please be advised that a significant amount of the information you plan to report is inaccurate.” LaSalle did not respond to multiple follow-up inquiries about any specific inaccuracies in Hunterbrook’s reporting.
We also contacted The GEO Group, Congressman Higgins, Gov. Landry, and ICE. None provided substantive responses as of press time.
Meanwhile, in another sign of its closer ties with ICE, LaSalle has been hiring contract process officers to work directly with ICE at field offices and detention centers in various states. The job involves helping with “removal planning,” as well as travel, transportation, and repatriation planning.
And last year, LaSalle Corrections V won a contract directly with ICE. It’s an open-ended vehicle that allows payments up to $125 million to the company for “detention and related services for aliens in immigration and customs enforcement custody,” both “within and outside of the contiguous United States.” So far, based on government records at SAM.gov and USASpending, it’s unclear whether the money has been allocated.
“So, you’re put in immigration detention,” Ahmed told Hunterbrook. “Your commissary is so much more expensive. You’re only allowed to go outside once a day for an hour, but that can be suspended at any point in time for any reason. You’re now stuck in a room between 50 and 70 people with, six to seven open showers where people are defecating and you can smell that in the room. You are freezing cold, like, the lights are on. It is just an environment that assists people in really losing their ability to live.”
“People can handle it for about three and a half months and then they can’t do it anymore,” Ahmed said. “They’ll take voluntary departure.”
Day after day, week after week, the planes taxi — and take off.
Author
Wendy Nardi joined Hunterbrook after working as a developmental and copy editor for academic publishers, government agencies, Fortune 500 companies, and international scholars. She has been a researcher and writer for documentary series and a regular contributor to The Boston Globe. Her other publications range from magazine features to fiction in literary journals. She has an M.A. in Philosophy from Columbia University and a B.A. in English from the University of Virginia.
Nick Chrastil is a reporter in New Orleans. He previously covered criminal justice for The Lens.
Michelle Cera trained as a sociologist specializing in digital ethnography and pedagogy. She completed her PhD in Sociology at New York University, building on her Bachelor of Arts degree with Highest Honors from the University of California, Berkeley. She has also served as a Workshop Coordinator at NYU’s Anthropology and Sociology Departments, fostering interdisciplinary collaboration and innovative research methodologies.
Editor
Jim Impoco is the award-winning former editor-in-chief of Newsweek who returned the publication to print in 2014. Before that, he was executive editor at Thomson Reuters Digital, Sunday Business Editor at The New York Times, and Assistant Managing Editor at Fortune. Jim, who started his journalism career as a Tokyo-based reporter for The Associated Press and U.S. News & World Report, has a Master’s in Chinese and Japanese History from the University of California at Berkeley.
Vikas Kumar joined Hunterbrook from The Capitol Forum, where he led the corporate investigations team for a decade as a senior editor. He was previously an attorney at Gordon Feinblatt, a trial attorney for the Department of Justice, and a law clerk for a federal judge. He has a J.D. from University of Virginia School of Law and a bachelor’s from Emory University. Vikas is based in Maryland.
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Perhaps most recently, ICE announced July 15 that Venezuelan detainee Jesus Manuel Arenas-Silva had died of cardiac arrest two days before “while enroute by bus” from the Irwin County Detention Center in Ocilla, Georgia, which LaSalle runs.
In 2017, the family of Michael Sabbie sued LaSalle Management after he was found dead in an isolation cell at the Bi-State Jail, in Texarkana, on the border of Texas and Arkansas, following an altercation with guards during which Sabbie was pepper-sprayed. Sabbie’s family argued that the denial of medical care was the result of LaSalle’s “custom of budgeting and spending inadequate amounts on jail medical care to make higher profits on the contract.” But defense attorneys for the company claimed LaSalle Management “had no involvement whatsoever in the facts and matters of this suit and merely provides accounting and payroll services for the other LaSalle entities” — including the Bi-State Jail. To support their claim, LaSalle submitted a contract for jail operations between Southwestern Correctional LLC and Bowie County, where the jail was located. But lawyers for Sabbie’s family discovered that the company had failed to submit the last page of the contract, where LaSalle Management identified itself as the “parent company” of Southwestern Correctional, and “unconditionally” guarantees the performance of operations under the jail contract. U.S. District Court Magistrate Judge Caroline Craven, noting the relevance of the missing page, recommended LaSalle’s motion to dismiss be denied. LaSalle eventually settled. Even so, LaSalle made a similar argument in the 2020 wrongful death lawsuit brought by the family of Holly Barlow-Austin. The complaint alleged LaSalle was responsible for poor training, inadequate staffing, and medical neglect, and that the company tried to avoid mandated reporting by sending Barlow-Austin to the hospital right before she died, “claiming that it didn’t have to report her death because she technically wasn’t 'in-custody' when she died." For their part, the defendants denied LaSalle Management was responsible “for the acts of its subsidiary, LaSalle,” and called LaSalle Management “a wholly separate legal entity” from LaSalle. But Craven found that parent company LaSalle Management was responsible for the actions of LaSalle Corrections and denied their motion to dismiss. The case resulted in a $7 million settlement to the family, reportedly among the largest in Texas at the time.
The 2025 complaint in another lawsuit, Gilbert v. LaSalle, alleges, “LaSalle’s provision of inadequate medical care is driven by the greed of its owner.” This lawsuit is one of two filed just months apart by Chicago law firm Romanucci & Blandin for deaths at LaSalle Correctional Center in Olla, Louisiana, a non-ICE prison LaSalle owns and runs. “LaSalle aggressively cuts costs by hiring untrained, unlicensed correctional officers and low-level nurses, hiring fewer personnel than necessary to properly manage the jails, refusing to invest in training for their personnel, and discouraging employees from transporting inmates to clinics or hospitals, even when there is a life-threatening medical concern.” The complaint notes, “LaSalle Corrections has a long and troubling history of failing to provide adequate medical care to people it detains.”
Moore had allegedly been taken to an area of LaSalle’s Richwood Correctional Center called “the Four Way,” which lacked surveillance cameras, and beaten, according to the court documents. He died of traumatic injuries to the brain. A press release from the plaintiff’s law firm noted, “After the incident, LaSalle did not provide any negative feedback to, let alone discipline, any involved staff member; instead, the warden praised and later promoted them.”
The issues cited in the GAP letter are not the only allegations of horrifying practices under LaSalle’s management. The same year, a national scandal broke alleging that ICE detainees at the LaSalle-run Irwin County Detention Center in Ocilla, Georgia, had allegedly been subjected to hysterectomies without their consent. Battling what it described as the company’s refusal to comply with requests, the House Committees on Homeland Security and Oversight and Reform sent Rodney Cooper a scathing letter on November 25, 2020, with a subpoena for documents. “LaSalle has refused to take even the most minimal steps to comply with the Committees’ requests for documents, and company employees have provided conflicting information to the Committees about its steps to locate and preserve documents,” the letter read. LaSalle was “actively obstructing the Committees’ efforts.” In the end, the public outcry was so intense, ICE stopped sending detainees there — until last fall, when ICE detentions resumed under the new deportation push.
ICE posted statements about 2024 meetings: January 30, March 3, July 1, August 16, November 22.
The exchange reads, “as executive director, who would be above you? Who would you answer to?" / “A. Well, just more or less the board of people, I guess, that have LaSalle Corrections. I don't really -- as executive director, they expect me to know how to operate the facility, so it's not a lot of direction given there." / “Q. And you say ‘the board,’ who all sits on the board?" / “A. I don't -- I don't even know who all the board would be." / “Q. Would it include Billy McConnell?" / “A. Yes.”
LaSalle prisons apparently aren’t nationally accredited: A search of the American Correctional Association website turned up no results for LaSalle Corrections sites. LaSalle is in a prison trade group called the Day 1 Alliance with public companies CoreCivic and The GEO Group, and the private Management & Training Corp., or MTC, and those companies are on the ACA listing; but not LaSalle under the names we’ve identified so far within the LLC network or seen on contracts with local sheriffs. Johnny Creed confirmed the lack of accreditation in his 2018 deposition for the Moore case and concluded that as a result, LaSalle’s prisons were not subject to ACA standards governing staffing or other prison conditions: “Q Did any of those standards apply to any of the facilities under your direction?" / "A No. Because none of them were ACA accredited." / "Q Okay. So, if they're not ACA accredited, y'all don't have to worry about those standards. Is that right?" / A That's right.” / In his 2020 deposition for the Moore case, Cooper said LaSalle Management didn’t require its Louisiana sites to follow ACA standards.
The assessor shows M&T Property Development as the owner of 182 Bastille Lane in Ruston.
In 2019, Correct Solutions Group — according to the website now doing business in a dozen states and also on the U.S. Virgin Islands — was sued by a former business partner, Smart Communications. The companies had banded together to provide prison phone service, tablets, and kiosks in a partnership apparently so lucrative, Smart Communications sued when CSG ended the contract early. The Second Amended Complaint declared, “This is a case where one party to a series of contracts is so covetous of the other party’s financial success under the contracts that it will stop at nothing to acquire a portion of those benefits for itself.”
Clay McConnell apparently completed most of the ordination process for the United Methodist Church, attaining the rank of provisional elder, according to the UMC website.
U.S. District Court Judge W. Louis Sands, Sr., noted “Billy McConnell’s admission that LaSalle Management has bank accounts—no great revelation—and its primary bank ‘is probably Guaranty Bank and Trust of Delhi,’” in a March 31, 2025, court order for the lawsuit Wooten v. LaSalle. “Yet Plaintiff did not obtain records from the Delhi bank. Thus, whether the LaSalle entities also use the Delhi bank, and, if so, whether the accounts are kept separately are mysteries,” the judge pointed out. “The Court, as a result, is once again in no position to evaluate the observance of corporate formalities or the financial independence of the LaSalle entities.” Calling the LaSalle personnel “challenging deponents,” whose answers “were generally evasive, vague, and inconsistent,” Sands wrote, “This problem is compounded by Plaintiff’s Counsel’s consistent failure to develop the deponents’ testimony beyond these initial unhelpful answers.” Still, Sands admitted, “the Court agrees with Plaintiff that Billy McConnell’s denials of knowledge are not particularly credible.”
Campaigns receive donations from the McConnells individually, as well as from corporate entities including the Richwood Correctional Center, Winn Correctional Center, Jackson Parish Correctional Center, and River Correctional Center. LaSalle Management also donates, as does B.A.S. Construction, and the cryptically named 1603 Highway 90 East - CFS, LLC, the address given for a warehouse for the Correctional Food Services company, another LLC registered to the family. CFS itself has also made contributions to candidates in Louisiana.
In a lawsuit last year, Georgetown scholar Badar Khan Suri alleged he’d been arrested by ICE and moved around repeatedly before landing at the staging facility, where booking or contact with his wife were delayed. From there, the complaint reads, he was transferred to the Prairieland ICE detention center in Texas. LaSalle operates Prairieland, which was the site of a “noise demonstration” last July that resulted in criminal convictions. Khan Suri has been released, according to CNN. The lawsuit is ongoing. A similar arrest was reported last week.
While ICE claims the site is for self-deporting people, it’s unclear how such a contract would apply to unaccompanied minor children. The AP reported, “Unaccompanied children who are in the U.S. without parents or close relatives are not taken to facilities overseen by ICE. Instead, the law says they must be swiftly placed in the care of state-licensed shelters and foster care programs. Those are run by the Office of Refugee Resettlement in the Department of Health and Human Services. However, that agency isn’t involved in the Alexandria facility’s operation, according to a spokesperson at the airfield where it’s being built. Instead, the facility would be run by a nonprofit arm of LaSalle Corrections.”
The January 30, 2025, commission meeting minutes posted to the Airpark website read, “Mr. Hennessy stated that he spoke with Congressman Higgins while in Washington DC and stated that the congressman wanted everything funneled through AEX.”