Near the 13th hole of a golf course in Alexandria, rural Louisiana, the Guardian US’s southern bureau chief, Oliver Laughland, could see ‘a telling image of where America is at the moment’. On one side, golfers teeing off on a scorching hot day; on the other, in the distance and through a fence, ‘lines of people shackled at the feet and hands, loaded on to planes’.
They were people being held at the Alexandria staging facility, a detention and removal centre that has become central to Donald Trump’s deportation regime.
The centre’s role was revealed by a Guardian investigation of leaked data, detailing tens of thousands of flights transporting immigrants across the US, carried out for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (Ice).
Laughland and the immigration reporter Maanvi Singh talk about what the investigation tells us about the inner workings of the Trump administration’s hardline immigration policies – and concerns about the denial of due process and the ‘disappearance’ of people from lawyers and their families.
Is the chaos and the cruelty by accident, asks Helen Pidd, or is it by design?
