Department of Justice

Protesters hold up signs outside court as a federal appeals court is scheduled to hear arguments in the cases of a Turkish Tufts University student who has been detained by immigration authorities for six weeks and a Palestinian student at Columbia University who was recently released from detention on Tuesday, May 6, 2025 in New York.

DOJ loses bid to keep detained Tufts student in Louisiana

The Associated Press

A federal appeals court on Wednesday upheld a judge’s order to bring a Turkish Tufts University student from a Louisiana immigration detention center back to New England for hearings to determine whether her rights were violated and if she should be released, denying a government request for a delay.

FILE - A group of African American students, left, enter the Boothville-Venice School in Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana on Sept. 12, 1966 as a group of white mothers wait at the entrance of the school.

Education

Justice Department ends decades-old school desegregation order in Louisiana. Others expected to fall

The Associated Press

The Justice Department is lifting a school desegregation order in Louisiana dating to the Civil Rights Movement, calling its continued existence a “historical wrong” and suggesting that others across the South should be eliminated.

“Protective Dreadlock Stylez No. 6” by John Alleyne is on display at the Cary Saurage Community Arts Center in Baton Rouge until Feb. 28.

Louisiana Considered

Art exhibit explores Black hairstyles; archdiocese evades legal accountability for sexual abuse; DOJ investigates small-town police department

Karen Henderson

Today on Louisiana Considered, we hear about an exhibit exploring the narratives woven into Black hair through an artistic lens. We also discuss how the indictment of one New Orleans priest for sexual assault landed the archdiocese in bankruptcy court and why the U.S. Department of Justice is investigating a small Mississippi town’s police department.

Vehicles enter at the main security gate at the Louisiana State Penitentiary — the Angola Prison, the largest high-security prison in the country in Angola, La., Aug. 5, 2008. A federal judge ruled on Friday, Sept. 8, 2023 that incarcerated youths be removed from a temporary lockup, at a former death row building in Louisiana’s adult maximum-security prison.

Law

Louisiana's prison population sees troubling growth in latest DOJ report

Kat Stromquist

For the first time in nearly a decade, U.S. prison populations are trending up. Louisiana's numbers are a part of troubling gains across the Gulf South.