03/31/2026
A woman imprisoned in a Louisiana ICE detention facility was r***d repeatedly over the course of months by the man assigned to guard her. He has pled guilty. He is due to be sentenced in federal court in less than two weeks.
Yesterday, the Department of Homeland Security posted a statement trying to distance itself from the crime. "David Courvelle is NOT and was NEVER an ICE employee," DHS wrote. "Courvelle was a contractor employed by a private company."
DHS didn't finish the sentence.
Courvelle was a contractor employed by a private company -- that was contracted by ICE to imprison immigrants on behalf of the federal government.
The woman he r***d was in ICE custody, in an ICE facility, under ICE's authority. The only reason DHS can claim he wasn't "theirs" is because they have outsourced the imprisonment of tens of thousands of people to for-profit corporations -- and when those corporations' employees commit crimes against the people in their care, ICE treats the contracting structure as a shield.
David Courvelle, 56, was a contract detention officer at the South Louisiana ICE Processing Center in Basile, a facility run by the GEO Group -- the largest private prison contractor in the country. He began targeting a Nicaraguan woman being held on an immigration matter, smuggling in gifts, food, and photographs of her daughter. Between May and July 2025, he r***d her multiple times in a janitorial closet while other detainees he had recruited stood lookout.
He was caught in July when staff saw the two exiting the closet. The facility's response was to transfer him to a different housing unit. He didn't resign until weeks later, after learning investigators had obtained recordings of phone calls between them. In a September interview, he denied everything -- then confessed 30 minutes later. He was released on a $10,000 bond.
His defense attorney has since filed a motion "in the interest of justice and in the interest of love," asking the court to let Courvelle contact the woman by phone -- she has since been deported to Nicaragua -- claiming they are in a romantic relationship. Prosecutors shut that down. When the woman was first interviewed during an August r**e investigation, she said the sexual contact was forced and painful. Prosecutors noted that allowing contact could influence her victim impact statement before sentencing. The judge denied the request.
No one held under another person's custodial authority in a detention facility can consent to a sexual relationship with the person guarding them. That is not a gray area. It is the law. Courvelle faces up to 15 years in prison when he is sentenced on April 10.
The company that employed him -- the GEO Group -- is one of the Republican Party's most reliable corporate donors. In every election cycle since 2016, at least 87 percent of its donations to federal candidates have gone to Republicans. Its PAC was the first corporation to max out on contributions to Trump's presidential campaign. In the 2024 cycle alone, GEO Group and its executives funneled nearly $2 million to Trump's campaign and another $500,000 to his inaugural committee.
The return on that investment has been enormous. The administration has rewarded GEO Group and companies like it with a massive expansion of detention contracts. It reported $2.6 billion in revenue in 2025 and now operates 19 ICE facilities across the country. Its third-quarter revenue in 2025 was $682 million -- roughly $75 million more than it earned in the same quarter the year before. GEO Group's stock has risen 73 percent since the election.
The Courvelle case is not an isolated incident -- not even at this one facility. A civil rights complaint filed months earlier by Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights, the ACLU of Louisiana, and the National Immigration Project alleged that a former assistant warden at the same Basile facility had sexually abused a woman on a near-daily basis for four months, and that officers had subjected detainees to forced labor, denial of medical care, and retaliatory solitary confinement spanning 2023 to 2025.
"I begged the U.S. government to help me," one woman said. "I filed complaints and grievances. I told ICE officers and medical staff. But they did nothing."
DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin called the accusations "a hoax."
Weeks later, Courvelle pled guilty.
What is happening at this one facility in Louisiana is part of a nationwide crisis. Forty-six people have died in ICE custody since the start of the second Trump administration -- the highest death toll in over two decades. One man died at Camp East Montana in El Paso after what ICE described as a "struggle" with guards. The medical examiner ruled it a homicide by asphyxia. Witnesses said guards handcuffed him, held him down, and choked him while he said he couldn't breathe. A Physicians for Human Rights report found that 95 percent of ICE custody deaths it examined were preventable if appropriate medical care had been provided.
And yet oversight is collapsing. Facility inspections dropped 36 percent in 2025 even as the detained population nearly doubled. The DHS offices responsible for catching abuse have been gutted by hundreds of staff cuts.
At least 14 people have died in ICE custody already in 2026 -- including one reported today. 2025 was the deadliest year in over two decades, and 2026 is on pace to surpass it.
At GEO Group's Adelanto facility in California in September, Ismael Ayala-Uribe, a 39-year-old former DACA recipient, begged for medical attention for days. The guards didn't believe he was sick. On his last visit with his mother, he told her, "Ya no puedo más, amá" -- I can't anymore, Mom. He died the next day. His family found out when police knocked on their door.
At the same facility last month, Alberto Gutierrez Reyes spent days begging for medical attention. No one listened. His son visited every Sunday, watching his father deteriorate. "Mom, dad's skin is yellow. His face is yellow," he told his mother one week. The next: "Mom, his eyes are yellow." Gutierrez Reyes died on February 27.
When DHS announced his death, the press release ended with: "This is the best healthcare that many aliens have received in their entire lives."
Fourteen of the 20 largest ICE detention centers sit in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas -- states where conservative federal courts reliably side with the administration on legal challenges, and where facilities operate far from detainees' families, lawyers, and journalists. For-profit contractors run roughly 90 percent of all ICE detention. And the administration is planning to expand the system on a scale never before seen.
ICE is spending $38.3 billion to build a network of warehouse "mega-centers" designed to hold 7,000 to 10,000 people each. One facility purchased in Georgia spans over a million square feet and is intended to hold up to 10,000 detainees. The goal is capacity for over 100,000 people -- a scale of mass detention not seen since the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II.
The pattern is always the same. When reports of abuse surface, the administration does not fix conditions -- it denies there is a problem and moves to shut down the channels through which the abuse becomes public.
At Dilley, the Texas detention camp for immigrant children, when children's letters describing their imprisonment reached millions, guards raided cells and destroyed the drawings. When Ms. Rachel showed her followers a 9-year-old talking about wanting to go to his spelling bee, DHS restricted video calls. Now, with the Courvelle case making national news, DHS's response is not to address the systemic failures that allowed a guard to r**e a woman for months in a facility they are responsible for. It is to post on social media that the ra**st technically wasn't their employee.
The Trump administration is not building a system of accountability. It is building a system designed to make accountability impossible -- bigger, more remote, more privatized, and more opaque.
As Jesse Franzblau of the National Immigrant Justice Center has said: "Immigration detention is a dark hole notorious for inhumane treatment, run largely by private prison companies who lobby intensely for taxpayer dollars to profit massively off the incarceration of human beings."
The men, women, and children trapped inside that system are paying the price.
The system is designed to make the people imprisoned in these facilities voiceless -- their letters confiscated, their video calls restricted, their complaints dismissed as hoaxes, their deaths announced in press releases that praise the quality of the healthcare they received.
Now is the time for all of us to be their voice. Here's how to take action:
--> Call your representatives via the Capitol Switchboard at (202) 224-3121 and demand accountability for conditions inside for-profit immigration detention facilities and an end to the expansion of warehouse mega-centers -- if you don't reach a staffer, be sure to leave a message
--> To support Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights, which filed the civil rights complaint against the Basile facility and continues to fight for the rights of detained immigrants, visit https://rfkhumanrights.org/
--> To support the National Immigrant Justice Center, which advocates for detained immigrants and conducts oversight of ICE facilities, visit https://immigrantjustice.org/
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For books for children and teens about the importance of standing up for truth, decency, and justice, even in dark times, visit our blog post, "Dissent Is Patriotic: 50 Books About Women Who Fought for Change," at https://www.amightygirl.com/blog?p=14364
For books for tweens and teens about girls living under real-life authoritarian regimes throughout history that will help them appreciate how precious democracy truly is, visit our blog post "The Fragility of Freedom: Mighty Girl Books About Life Under Authoritarianism" at https://www.amightygirl.com/blog?p=32426
For books for children, teens, and adults about Mighty Girl immigrants of the past and present, visit our blog post, "A New Land, A New Life: 25 Mighty Girl Books About the Immigrant Experience" at https://www.amightygirl.com/blog?p=12855
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To read more about the Courvelle case, visit https://www.kalb.com/2025/12/29/ice-officer-pleads-guilty-sexually-abusing-detainee-louisiana-facility/
To read the civil rights complaint against the Basile facility, visit https://lailluminator.com/2025/09/19/ice-abuse-louisiana/
To read about the record number of deaths in ICE custody, visit https://www.npr.org/2026/03/10/g-s1-111238/immigration-detention-deaths-custody
To read about conditions at GEO Group's Adelanto facility, visit https://abc7.com/post/federal-lawsuit-alleges-poor-conditions-adelanto-ice-processing-center/18480494/
To read about the for-profit detention industry's record profits, visit https://time.com/7378284/ice-immigration-detention-contractors-record-revenue/
For more about DHS's current efforts to vastly expand their detention facilities -- including ones for children -- you can learn about their efforts to buy massive warehouses around the country at https://wapo.st/4tbdV7k -- and about community opposition to their plans at https://wapo.st/4bZyuwI
The first step to oppose such expansion is to learn about any plans for your state, and then connect with others to oppose warehouse detention centers in your state. Connect with local immigrant rights groups and/or local Indivisible chapter to see if there are current efforts already underway to support. To find an Indivisible group in your area, visit https://indivisible.org/groups
