RICHWOOD, Louisiana – Months after leaving immigration detention, Camila Muñoz can still remember the ice-cream scooper used to ladle food onto plastic trays and the “sour feeling” after every meal.
Hunger.
“You have to eat no matter what, or the night is going to get you,” she told USA TODAY. “We were really hungry.”
In Louisiana – a major hub of the Trump administration’s mass deportation effort – detainees and their representatives say people in custody are going hungry on a diet of processed foods that are barely edible, often expired and never filling.
A week’s menu served at Richwood in August, obtained by USA TODAY, offers a glimpse into the lives of detained immigrant women and how they are fed.
At the Richwood lock-up, the breakfast scoop of oatmeal or powdered eggs aren’t worth waking up for, they say. A ration of pasta with canned meat and canned green beans at lunch leaves them hungry. Sunday dinner – a thin slice of bologna between white bread and an ounce of potato chips – isn’t enough. Women detained long-term say they haven’t had fresh fruit in months.
Of the nearly 750 immigrant women being held there in August, according to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement data – 97% had no criminal record.
Detained women say that among the humiliations they’re subjected to – one hour of outdoor sunlight a day, backed-up toilets, bug infestations, mildewed showers, packed dormitories – the poor food is the hardest to stomach. And as the population at ICE detention centers increases, the quality and quantity of the food has deteriorated, immigrants and their representatives say.
Louisiana-based LaSalle Corrections runs the Richwood facility on behalf of ICE, with the town as a contractual go-between. USA TODAY provided both LaSalle and ICE with details of the allegations in writing.
In an emailed response, Department of Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said ICE detainees “are provided with proper meals (and) potable water” following national detention standards.
“As ICE arrests and removes criminal illegal aliens and public safety threats from the U.S., the agency has worked diligently to obtain greater necessary detention space while avoiding overcrowding,” she said.
LaSalle Corrections spokesman Scott Sutterfield told USA TODAY the Richwood facility “strictly adheres to ICE detention standards and is monitored by ICE, on-site personnel and the Department of Homeland Security.”
Richwood Correctional Center in Richwood, Louisiana, is an ICE facility run by private contractor LaSalle Corrections.
“In addition, the Richwood facility is subject to a multi-level oversight and compliance program, which includes on-site compliance reviews,” he said in an emailed response to questions.
Food service issues aren’t unique to Richwood or Louisiana detention; they are longstanding and predate the current Trump administration. A Government Accountability Office report, released in May, reviewed more than 240 ICE detention facility inspections nationwide and recorded more than 500 deficiencies related to food service.
Immigrant advocates worry the enforcement ramp-up this year is exacerbating the issues, including a diet they say weakens and sickens detainees.
“The goal is to keep people in there as cheaply as possible,” said Lydia Pelot-Hobbs, an assistant professor at the University of Kentucky who has studied detention in Louisiana. “That’s why the food is terrible… These conditions of confinement might mirror what we’re used to in prisons and jails and can sometimes be worse.”
Detention isn’t supposed to be punishing
Immigration detention is civil, not criminal, and is not supposed to be punishing. ICE states so clearly on its detention management website: “Detention is non-punitive.”
By law, immigrants may be detained while they await the outcome of their immigration proceedings or while they await their deportation, according to ICE’s 2025 National Detention Standards.
But detained immigrants aren’t charged, convicted or sentenced as in the criminal system. They don’t know how long they’ll be detained, whether they’ll get to stay in the United States or if they’ll be sent to their native country.
There were roughly 60,000 people in immigration detention nationwide in both August and September – more than at any time since the United States government interned some 120,000 people, the majority of Japanese citizenship or ancestry, during World War II.
The Trump administration has cut back on detention alternatives like ankle monitors, according to ICE data. The agency is instead holding people in jails, prisons or tent encampments – the first and largest on the Fort Bliss military base in Texas – before deporting them. More people are spending weeks and months, not days, in detention, ICE data shows.
Reports of poor quality food and detainees going hungry are “not something new,” said Setareh Ghandehari, advocacy director at Detention Watch Network, a nonprofit that advocates to end immigration detention. “But it has intensified over the last few months.
“People are reporting to loved ones and lawyers that they don’t have enough food,” she said. “I have heard them describe it as they are starving.”
One woman’s account
Muñoz was detained at Richwood from February to April. Another woman detained at Richwood shared her account of the food service with USA TODAY.
Camila Munoz sketched this picture of herself in an ICE detention center. She was detained on Feb. 15, 2025, while returning from her honeymoon in San Juan, Puerto Rico.
Food is often served under-cooked, “like ice from the freezer” or overcooked and burned, said the woman, who requested anonymity fearing retaliation. “Everyone has problems with the restroom – stomach problems.”
The food was “horrible” from the beginning of her detention months ago, the woman said. But both the quantity and quality has gotten worse as more and more detainees have arrived.
She and other women look forward to Tuesday lunch. That’s the one day they are fed a quarter chicken. That week, the Tuesday tray included broccoli, powdered mashed potatoes and cookies. Then dinner: a scoop of rice, corn, two mini tortillas and a scoop of canned apple.
Other days are worse. Jars of jelly had crystallized. Beans sometimes smelled rancid. A slice of bologna still had ice on it from not being thawed. Meal times are always unpredictable, with breakfast as early as 4 a.m., lunch at 10 a.m. and dinner many hours later, she and other detainees and their representatives said.
One day, the menu was beans and sausages, but she was only served two sausage links when others were given a few more.
“I was so hungry that day because we were waiting for so long (to eat),” she said in her account, noting that mealtime often varied by hours. “I asked the woman (serving the food), ‘Can you give me more?'”
The detainee, who has an administrative immigration violation but no criminal record, said being in detention was the first time in her life she’s felt such a desperate need for more food. So desperate she once found herself contemplating grabbing food from another’s plate.
“It’s so scary. I never thought in the world in the 21st century that I would feel that ‒ to want to take somebody’s food,” she said. “It’s humiliating.”
Small portions, processed foods
Richwood’s concertina wire-fenced compound is tucked into a residential neighborhood in the small town of Richwood, Louisiana, population 3,804.
Inside, hundreds of women from around the world await deportation or a chance to see an immigration judge – sometimes for months on end.
Like the woman who shared her August menu, other detainees in Richwood have shared similar complaints about deteriorating food quality with their lawyers and loved ones.
LaSalle had, in fact, made a change to its food purchasing contract.
Federal inspection reports listed Performance Food Service as the “food services provider” at Richwood in 2024, but a spokesman for the publicly traded company said its role was “strictly limited to distribution.” The company wasn’t responsible for planning menus, preparing meals or managing food service.
“What I can share is that the amount of product we provide to Richwood Correctional Facility has declined significantly this year,” said Scott Golden, director of external communications for Performance Food Service. “That drop is tied to a decision by facility management to transition to a lower-cost institutional food distributor, Shaver Foods, based in Arkansas.”
Shaver Foods didn’t respond to an emailed request for comment by USA TODAY. It bills itself online as “the industry leader in low cost institutional food distribution.”
Client complaints about the food began rising this year at Louisiana ICE detention centers, said Stephen Stanford, a Baton Rouge-based immigration attorney.
His clients with diabetes and kidney disease have struggled to get the medically required meals they need at Richwood and other Louisiana detention centers, “even though many had put in medical requests,” he said.
Nora Ahmed, legal director of the ACLU of Louisiana, said she “started hearing this year that people were not getting enough food and they were losing weight.”
“Across facilities, I’m hearing there is not enough food,” she said, “and that the portions are smaller.”
The cost of feeding detainees
Nationwide, detainee complaints to inspectors about small portions and hunger date to at least the early 2000s, according to Deirdre Conlon and Nancy Hiemstra, authors of a new book on immigration detention, “Immigration Detention Inc.: The Big Business of Locking Up Migrants.”
“There is this incredible potential to make money by not giving even the small amount of food you have said you would deliver,” Hiemstra said. “There is little motivation to deliver quality food. Bad food is the business model.”
The 2025 National Detention Standards don’t list a calories-per-day standard for food service. They do require each detention center hire a “Food Services Administrator” to develop menus certified by a registered dietician. The standards direct facilities to “provide detainees with nutritious, attractively presented meals, prepared and served in a sanitary and hygienic food service operation.”
The Richwood facility fulfills that mandate, Sutterfield said. It “provides three daily meals approved by a registered dietitian and snacks.”
He added that Richwood’s menus “meet the U.S. Recommended Daily Allowance guidelines and accommodate special religious or dietary needs.”
In May 2024, inspectors found that Richwood failed to post menus that met meal standards.
The Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Detention Oversight found the facility lacked the required “common fare” menu and menus “certified as exceeding minimum daily nutritional requirements and meeting recommended daily allowances.”
An inspection six months later didn’t find the same deficiencies, suggesting LaSalle had resolved the issues at that time.
Hiemstra and Conlon say there isn’t enough genuine oversight over whether contractors consistently meet food standards.
Inspections are often pre-announced, they say. And chronic detainee hunger is often dismissed by inspectors, as long as the menus are certified as nutritionally adequate.
“What repeatedly happens is detainees complain, and then inspectors ask the facility operators what they are serving,” Hiemstra said. “They don’t actually look at what is really being served. They take operators’ word over detainees’.”
Filling the gaps with commissary
Muñoz, the former detainee, said immigrant women can work the cafeteria for $1 per day, overseen by LaSalle corrections officers.
Although the pay rate in immigration detention is the subject of ongoing litigation, it’s one of a handful of jobs detainees can do to earn money that they can spend on snack items at the commissary.
“A loaf of bread was $3,” Muñoz recalled. “You could work for three days and it was affordable.”
Hiemstra and Conlon argue that underfeeding detainees drives them to spend more at the commissary – if they can afford it. It’s not uncommon that the commissary at immigration detention centers is run by a subsidiary of the same company that provides food service, they say.
The company operating the commissary at Richwood, Correct Commissary, is registered to the same address as the company that owns and operates the jail, LaSalle, according to Louisiana Secretary of State records.
Muñoz said she felt lucky to have access to commissary snacks, thanks to money sent from her American husband. But it didn’t make mealtimes any less stressful.
Bradley Bartell and Camila Munoz were returning to Wisconsin from a honeymoon in Puerto Rico when she was detained by ICE.
She would calculate where to sit at every meal, knowing who wouldn’t eat this or that and might share – even though sharing was against the rules. She gave up her sausages to Vietnamese detainees, and they would give her their corn bread, she said.
“With time, you get smart and wise,” she said. “We didn’t know each other’s language. None of us knew when we would be deported. That’s what connected us.”
Lauren Villagran covers immigration for USA TODAY and can be reached at lvillagran@usatoday.com.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: ICE promises ‘proper meals.’ Detainees say they’re going hungry.
