England Airpark Executive Director Ralph Hennessey asks security to remove an attendee from the England Authority Board meeting in Alexandria on Aug. 27, 2026. (Photo by Christiana Botic/Verite News and Catchlight Local/Report for America)
ALEXANDRIA — The governing body responsible for the England Airpark in Alexandria is set to rake in close to $3 million over a five-year period by leasing property for use as an immigration detention facility, according to a contract obtained by Verite News through a public records request.
The contract was first approved by the England Authority Board in February and signed in early August by England Airpark Executive Director Ralph Hennessy and William McConnell, of the LaSalle Family Foundation, a private contractor hired to run the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility. It gives LaSalle control over 10 acres of land and two buildings — an office building and a three-story former barracks — at the airpark, a former Air Force base whose footprint now includes the Alexandria International Airport, a major hub for deportation flights.
In return for the use of the property, LaSalle will pay the England Authority an annual rent of about $536,000 for the first year of the five-year lease, with rent payments increasing each year through the final year. By the end of the contract, rent will be more than $600,000. In total, the contract commits LaSalle to about $2.84 million in rent over the course of the contract.
It’s not clear how those rates compare to the usual rent the airpark charges for the use of its property. Hennessy did not respond to questions about the contract.
The conversion of the airpark land to a detention center has been a source of concern and cause for protest among many Louisiana residents, who have railed against the idea of family and children detention. Though the former base already hosts a so-called immigration “staging center,” ICE critics have been particularly inflamed about the specific population of immigrants who will be housed at the new facility.
The agreement describes it as a “temporary staging center at the England Airpark to house families, unaccompanied alien children, and adult females for voluntary removal from the United States of America.”
“What makes you think that this company will treat women, children and families any different than (the people in) the facilities they operate now?” said Tania Wolf with Southeast Dignity Not Detention Coalition to the airpark’s board during its September meeting, referring to allegations of abuse and neglect as well as recent deaths at LaSalle-run facilities.
The agreement, a cooperative endeavor agreement, is just one piece of the puzzle in understanding how the detention facility for the so-called repatriation program, a program that authorities say helps immigrants voluntarily departing, will operate.
Other agreements, such as the one between the England Authority and the federal government, known as an intergovernmental service agreement have not been provided to Verite News. The England Authority has said that it would have to coordinate with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and ICE before releasing any part of the intergovernmental service agreement with those two entities.
While the language in the contract appears largely to be boilerplate for a government land lease — rent amounts, an indemnity clause protecting the airpark from legal liability and a provision holding LaSalle responsible for regular maintenance — it does provide some new insights.
For one, despite months of reporting identifying the LaSalle Family Foundation as the nonprofit arm of LaSalle Corrections, a Louisiana-based private prison operator that already operates a number of immigration detention centers in Louisiana and other states, the contract is actually with a for-profit company — albeit one named after the LaSalle nonprofit.
At the time that the England Authority approved the detention center project, at its monthly Meeting on Feb. 26, the only LaSalle Family Foundation in Louisiana was a charitable group run by the McConnell family — a Ruston-based family whose patriarch William McConnell founded LaSalle Corrections.
But between that meeting and when the contract was signed in August, a new, for-profit LaSalle Family Foundation was registered in Delaware. The firm, like its nonprofit namesake, is also controlled by McConnell. A bit less than a month later, in mid-August, the nonprofit LaSalle Family Foundation changed its name to Bastille Outreach, apparently after the street in Ruston where LaSalle’s headquarters is located.
It was that company, the brand-new LaSalle Family Foundation, that is named as the signatory to the cooperative endeavor agreement. The company registered to do business in Louisiana at the end of September — more than a month after it signed the agreement with the England Authority — according to the Louisiana Secretary of State’s website.
The switch from the nonprofit group to the for-profit company was at least the second time that the precise contractor taking over the airpark property has changed.
Prior to the February meeting, the England Authority had identified the prospective contractor as LaSalle Corrections Transport, a subsidiary of LaSalle Corrections.
But at the meeting in February, before the board voted on authorizing Hennessy to sign the contract with LaSalle, Matt Nowlin, the airpark’s lawyer said the partner in the agreement was actually not LaSalle Corrections Transport but the nonprofit LaSalle Family Foundation that would be signing the contract with the England Authority.
During the same meeting, Scott Sutterfield, a former senior ICE official and spokesperson for LaSalle Corrections, introduced himself to the board as representing the nonprofit organization based in Ruston.
In other words, even though the public and the board were given the impression that the contract would go to a charitable group, and no further public votes were taken on authorizing the contract before it was signed, it ultimately went to an entirely separate, for-profit entity.
In an interview, New Orleans attorney Scott Sternberg, who has worked extensively in Louisiana government transparency law, said the description of the events provided by Verite News did not raise any alarms with him, especially without a full understanding of the details.
“This kind of thing seems pretty normal. You contract with one entity and they create a new entity because it’s better for taxes or whatever,” Sternberg said.
Verite News contacted LaSalle officials, including Sutterfield, for comment. None responded, nor did the England Authority and several of its board members.
Additional information gleaned from reviewing the agreement include verification of the amount of money that the England Authority is set to collect from LaSalle. The rental agreement is on a sliding scale, where LaSalle will pay roughly $536,000 in its first year of the contract and roughly $600,000 in its fifth year. Hennessy did not respond to a request for comment on how the money from renting two buildings and roughly 10 acres near the airfield will be used toward economic development in the region.
The agreement also lists the array of services that need to be provided for the people held at the staging facility and requirements that LaSalle will contractually need to meet, including establishing grievance procedures, legal visitation and attorney access, medical and behavioral services and religious accommodations for people held there.
While details about the day-to-day operations were not in the contract obtained through a records request, during the September board meeting at England Airpark, Sutterfield introduced Anovaeon, a company based in San Antonio, Texas. Anovaeon’s CEO Eric Fritz described how his organization intended on providing safe and dignified care for families enduring “pretty crappy circumstances.”
Earlier this year, Project Salt Box, an all-volunteer investigative journalism nonprofit and ICE detention watchdog, reported that Anovaeon had been recruiting workers for a controversial planned warehouse detention facility in western Maryland. The warehouse deportation model was an effort under former DHS Secretary Kristi Noem to beef up Trump’s mass deportation efforts by detaining people in revamped warehouses for deportation.
Project Salt Box reported last week that the administration has since shifted from the warehouse model to pursue different models to facilitate detention and deportation, and that ICE is trying to sell many of the warehouses it purchased.
During the September board meeting at the airpark, Fritz touted his company’s transparency and approachability.
“Our team is here today because we stand by the work that we do. We’re not going to hide our faces. We’re going to give you a pamphlet so you know who we are. You can reach out to me. The website’s there. Hit that contact button, you’ll reach me,” he told everyone in attendance.
Anovaeon did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
While the England Authority could already be receiving some of the money from rent and security deposits according to the contract, sources in Alexandria said that as of Wednesday morning, they hadn’t seen any activity at the family and child detention facility to indicate people were already being held there.
Erin Tracy, an organizer with CENLA Activism, one of the grassroots organizations opposed to the facility said that keeping an eye on the site is the “most depressing waiting game,” she’s experienced.
“It could literally be today or weeks from now,” Tracy said. “It’s really unpleasant that we’re waiting on something so shitty.”
This article first appeared on Verite News New Orleans and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
