Louisiana Made It Nearly Impossible to Get Parole. Now It’s Releasing Prisoners to Deport Them.

One by one, the prisoners — all immigrants — appeared briefly over video before a special panel of the Louisiana parole board.

The August hearings were unusual in a state that, under Republican Gov. Jeff Landry, has made it increasingly difficult for most prisoners to get early release.

Unlike normal parole hearings, the board didn’t grill the prospective parolees about their crimes — ranging from car theft to vehicular homicide — to gauge their remorse. Nor did it review their disciplinary records to determine if they posed a threat to public safety. And no one was present to represent or speak on behalf of their victims.

In fact, most of the nine men, clad in black-and-white-striped jumpsuits or plain orange ones, did not say a word besides their names and inmate numbers. Only one was even eligible for parole.

But in each case, the three-member panel voted unanimously for release after just a few minutes of consideration.

“Today you’ve been paroled,” panel chair Steve Prator said at the end of every hearing, “to go straight into an ICE facility for deportation from the United States.”

Some thanked the board. Others sat stone-faced or simply nodded.

These days, a 100% grant rate is unheard of for the Louisiana Board of Parole. Where annual parole rates previously stood around 50%, in the two years since Landry became governor, less than a quarter of those eligible have been paroled.

Landry, a former police officer and sheriff’s deputy who served as Louisiana attorney general until 2024, has blasted early release programs as an insult to crime victims, insisting that anyone who is convicted in Louisiana should serve the entirety of their sentence. He pushed Republican lawmakers to eliminate parole entirely for those arrested after Aug. 1, 2024, and to impose strict eligibility requirements for those already in prison.

But this year the same Legislature tossed all of that aside for one category of prisoner: immigrants without legal status. With mass deportations a key policy priority for President Donald Trump, Republican-led state and local governments have taken aggressive steps to deliver. In May, Landry signed an order seeking to “crack down on criminal illegal aliens” by granting the Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections and other state agencies the authority to conduct certain Immigration and Customs Enforcement duties. In June, Louisiana lawmakers created an expedited “alien removal process” through the special parole panel that passed with little notice during the last legislative session.

“They have the ability to release a lot of people to parole, and they’re choosing to only do it for this specific group because it’s politically popular,” said Bridget Geraghty, senior counsel with the MacArthur Justice Center, a Chicago-based legal nonprofit focused on prison reform.

At least two other Republican-led states have recently put in place similar initiatives to parole and deport prisoners without legal status. South Dakota paroled 10 immigrant prisoners to be deported over the summer. In Oklahoma, Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt announced in February that the state had identified about 525 prisoners subject to deportation.

Since the Aug. 27 hearings in Louisiana, at least two of the nine men paroled have been deported, while two others from Vietnam are being held at a newly designated immigration detention facility on the grounds of the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, according to ICE. Neither ICE nor the Landry administration would answer questions about the locations of the five other parolees or whether they are being deported to their home countries of Honduras, Mexico and Nicaragua.

On Sept. 21, ICE’s regional office in New Orleans posted a photo of one of the parolees, Samuel Lara Garcia, handcuffed in front of a staircase leading to a plane. The agency identified Garcia as a citizen of Honduras.

“HOMICIDE DEPORTATION,” the X post blared.

Garcia, 36, had pleaded guilty to negligent homicide and obstruction of justice in a 2022 shooting after an argument at a Baton Rouge house party. He was sentenced to 13 years in 2024 but had served less than two years in prison before being paroled.

A U.S. citizen convicted of the same crime — or any crime — in Louisiana today would not be eligible for release under the new parole laws championed by Landry.

ICE declined an interview request with Madison Sheahan, a former Landry administration official who as deputy ICE director signed the partnership agreement between the agency and the corrections department. The Landry administration did not respond to questions about the new parole panel or the governor’s broader executive order, which was named Operation Geaux.

One member of that task force is Keith Conley, police chief of Kenner, a New Orleans suburb and one of the first Louisiana cities to formally partner with federal immigration authorities during Trump’s second term. He praised the legislation that created the deportation panel in a recent interview. Paroling and deporting prisoners who are illegally in the United States frees up jail space and saves tax dollars, Conley said, “so it just seems like a win, win.”

Under the new law, the deportation panel operates unbound by the restrictions and responsibilities placed on the regular parole process. A parole board is normally tasked with deciding whether prisoners are ready for release based on a number of factors including their behavior behind bars, efforts to rehabilitate, whether they pose a risk to the public and victims’ opinions.

During the August hearings, however, the board was not required to abide by the eligibility restrictions imposed by the Legislature last year, including the requirement that prisoners have clean disciplinary records for at least three years and low-risk scores as determined by an algorithm.

“Parole granted for the purpose of deportation is fundamentally different from discretionary parole granted to individuals who have demonstrated readiness for community supervision,” Francis Abbott, executive director of the parole board, told Verite News and ProPublica. “In these cases, the individuals are present in the United States unlawfully and have been convicted of criminal offenses.”

To be eligible to appear before the new panel, prisoners must have a federal deportation notice and not have been convicted of a sex offense or a violent crime that carries a sentence of more than 10 years. (Louisiana law does not consider negligent homicide to be a violent crime.)

Christopher Walters, deputy executive counsel with the Landry administration, said at a May legislative hearing that the state has identified about 390 prisoners who might be eligible to be paroled and deported. The corrections department would not verify or update that number.

“It’s an ongoing process to determine eligibility for this specific legislation,” Derrick Ellis, the department’s deputy secretary, said in a recent interview.

There are no more hearings scheduled for the remainder of the year, according to the parole board.

Unlike typical parolees, who are required to check in regularly with their parole officers and prohibited from unauthorized travel, those paroled to be deported are not placed under any supervision. Once deported, they are released with one stipulation: Do not return to the United States.

Louisiana law says those who do return will be forced to serve the remainder of their sentences. But that may not be enough of a deterrent. Margaret Hay, first assistant district attorney with the Jefferson Parish District Attorney’s Office, which prosecuted one of the deported men, said prosecutors are concerned parolees convicted of violent crimes “may, very quickly, just be right back in this country.”

“There’s no guarantee that our border will remain as secure as I believe that it might be right now,” said Hay, who nevertheless said she supports the initiative.

ProPublica and Verite News contacted the embassies and consulates for Mexico, Nicaragua, Honduras and Vietnam to learn how those countries manage the repatriation of deportees whose U.S. prison sentences were cut short. None responded to multiple phone calls and emails.

Another issue at play is that Louisiana law requires the parole committee to notify victims about upcoming parole hearings, provided they are registered with the Louisiana Victim Outreach Program, a state initiative that provides support services. Many victims of crime, especially those who are undocumented, fail to register for or are unaware of the state program. The parole board said there were no registered victims in the nine cases that appeared before the deportation panel in August.

Several local prosecutors said they tried reaching the families of the six victims who had been killed by four of the paroled men, three of whom were charged with vehicular homicide, but had trouble making contact. ProPublica and Verite News could not reach any of the victims or family members of deceased victims in the cases involving the nine men.

Landry, a Trump ally, has long been an immigration hard-liner. During his eight years as attorney general, which began a year before Trump’s first term as president, Louisiana’s capacity for detaining immigrants expanded from two facilities in 2016 to eight. That positioned the state to become a key partner in Trump’s mass deportation agenda during his second presidency.

In September, Landry and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem unveiled a ninth immigration detention facility, known as the Louisiana Lockup, located in the former solitary confinement wing of the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. That is where Hoang Huy Pham, one of the nine men paroled in August, is being held as he awaits deportation to Vietnam, the country his family said he fled as a child refugee during the Vietnam War.

Pham’s daughter Theresa, who asked to be referred to by only her first name because she works for the federal government and fears retaliation, said her father called her in June to tell her he was going to be paroled at the end of August after spending 20 years in prison for a long history of car theft. He told her he would live in a halfway house before rejoining the family in Baton Rouge, Theresa recalled. She said her elderly grandfather — Pham’s father — was looking forward to him finally getting out of prison to help with his care.

Then in September, Theresa received another call from her father. This time, he told her he had been transferred to Angola to await deportation. That five-minute call was the last time Theresa said she heard from him.

“You finally got out, but you’re going somewhere else where you’re not supposed to be,” Theresa said. “It’s a false hope.”

Hervin Pineda was the only prisoner to tell the parole board in August that he wanted to be deported back home. He wished to return to Nicaragua to be with his ailing, elderly mother in her final days, he told the board through an interpreter.

Pineda, who had previously been deported while on probation, had served less than a year of a seven-year sentence on charges of cocaine possession.

Nevertheless, the board granted his request.

“You’re a serious dope dealer,” Prator, the panel chair, told him. “We don’t want you back.”

ICE took him into federal custody that day and deported him to Nicaragua on Sept. 12.