When I interviewed a senior congressman last week about his recent visit to Mississippi’s largest immigration detention center, something he mentioned really stood out.
Rep. Bennie Thompson, a Democrat from Mississippi, visited the Adams County Correctional Center in Natchez on April 9. When he was there, he said, the facility was holding just 1,400 people.
That’s a long way from its maximum capacity of 2,500. Data released by Immigration and Customs Enforcement on April 2 showed that more than 2,100 people were being held in Adams.
I was surprised to hear that the population had shrunk during the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown. But it wasn’t just Rep. Thompson who had mentioned it. Several detainees were telling me that they had been moved from their original units, which were now empty, and consolidated into others.
In a message, one detainee, Melvin Funez, wrote that they were “seeing less and less people come” every day.
The detainees had also been hearing rumors: that the government was arresting fewer people, that deportations were happening more quickly, and that some housing units in the facility were shutting down. A Mississippi lawyer who represents dozens of Adams detainees reached out to me recently to ask if I knew anything about the facility closing, because people were asking him.
There was no public information about this, so I reached out to Brian Todd, spokesman for CoreCivic, the private company that owns and runs the facility.
He declined to respond “out of respect” for ICE and redirected me to its public affairs office.
ICE has not responded.
I also filed a request seeking the population of the Adams facility over the past three months, the number of arrests nationally and the populations of other dedicated ICE facilities, but the agency hasn’t responded yet to this, or to any of my past requests.
Next, I started calling Adams County’s Board of Supervisors, because the county is party to the contract between ICE and CoreCivic. Warren Gaines, one of the supervisors, said he hadn’t heard anything about the facility closing. The board had just met on Monday, he said, and something like that would have been discussed.
Nationally, as of early March, the number of immigration arrests has remained high – more than three times the number in 2024. The number of detainees in other facilities, including major ones such as those in El Paso, Texas, and Stewart County, Georgia, has remained stable, and in some cases has even gone up. Keep in mind that this is all based on the data released on April 2, so things may have changed in the following weeks.
I’m keeping an eye out for more information and will keep you posted if I get any more answers. In the meantime, if you know anything about what’s going on at the Adams facility or reasons behind this change in population, please contact me.
Note to our readers: In addition to the population dip, if you know something about the detention center, if you know someone who works there or is detained there, or want me to find out something about it for readers, please get in touch.
I will not use your name or any part of your submission without contacting you first. If you prefer to get in touch with me anonymously, send me a message on Signal @mmj.2178. Or you can contact me via email at mukta.joshi@nytimes.com.
Our mailing address is P.O. Box 12267, Jackson, MS 39236.
