A Sheraton hotel in Louisiana has been used by immigration officials to hold people who are being deported, in what appears to be a contradiction of a position Sheraton’s parent company, Marriott, took in 2019 when it said its properties would not be used in cooperation with Ice.
The Intercept first reported that the hotel, located on MacArthur Drive in Alexandria, Louisiana, near a major deportation hub and airport used by Ice, had been used by immigration officials earlier this month to hold a father and his teenage son for four days after their arrest in New York. They were then deported to Ecuador. The Intercept cited phone-tracking evidence that had been shared with the publication and was later seen by the Guardian.
The evidence corroborates the account of a source with knowledge of hotel operations in Alexandria, who told the Guardian that they believed the venue had been used to detain immigrant families and unaccompanied children since it was renovated in late 2023. The source observed Ice contractors known to assist in the transfer of unaccompanied minors operating at the Sheraton as recently as June of this year.
The source added that other hotels in the area have also been used to hold immigrant families.
It is not clear whether Marriott has a formal contract with Ice or what the company knows about Ice’s use of the Sheraton in Alexandria. In one case that emerged last year, Marriott sued a New York-based franchise after the hotel entered a partnership with the city for it to be used as an immigrant shelter, saying it had done so without Marriott’s consent.
Marriott did not respond to several requests for comment.
“It would be highly unfortunate if major hotel chains are facilitating the Trump administration’s cruel policy of deporting families,” said Lee Gelernt, deputy director of the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project.
In 2019, during Donald Trump’s first term, Marriott rejected the idea that any of its hotels or properties – which include Sheraton and Courtyard hotels – would be used by Ice to detain immigrants. It made the statement at a time when the Trump administration was calling for a mass roundup of undocumented immigrants. Citing anonymous sources, ABC News reported at the time that administration officials had internally discussed the possibility that they might need hotel rooms because of limited capacity at Ice detention centers.
“Our hotels are not configured to be detention facilities, but to be open to guests and community members as well. While we have no particular insights into whether the US government is considering the use of hotels to aid in the situation at the border, Marriott has made the decision to decline any requests to use our hotels as detention facilities,” a company spokesperson said in July 2019, according to ABC News.
The company’s position won it plaudits at the time, such as public recognition by the American Historical Association, an association of professional historians, which announced in a public statement that it appreciated Marriott’s “principled stand” and noted the importance of immigrants to the hotel and related industries.
It is well-documented that Ice does use hotels to house immigrant families who are being deported from the US or being transferred to other detention centers.
In a case that attracted national attention in April, Ice detained two families in Louisiana with three of their US citizen children and held them incommunicado and under guard at a hotel for days on end, despite multiple attempts by family members and lawyers to contact them.
The families, along with their US citizen children, were deported in the early hours of 25 April and, according to legal filings, had been held at a location in Alexandria.
Filings in that case reviewed by the Guardian include a short, handwritten submission by one of the mothers written on paper that closely matches images of branded Sheraton notepads posted online. The Guardian could not independently confirm whether the families had been detained at the Sheraton in Alexandria.
The Intercept’s reporting focused on the story of Edison Iza and his 15-year-old son, Roger, who were reportedly arrested by Ice at an immigration check-in New York on 9 August. The pair were then reportedly flown to Louisiana and “locked up” in the Sheraton hotel, where they stayed for four days without access to their phones or the internet.
“We couldn’t call or go on the web to ask for help,” Roger told the Intercept. “Without our phones, we didn’t know any names or phone numbers.”
Ice did not immediately respond to the Guardian’s questions about the agency’s use of the Sheraton, including whether it has a contract with the hotel or uses it on an ad hoc basis.
The hospitality industry is especially vulnerable to Ice raids and the Trump administration’s deportation program, given the high percentage of workers in the industry who are undocumented.
While the Department of Homeland Security issued guidance earlier this year that Ice agents were not to conduct raids at hotels, restaurants and farms, that guidance was later reversed, according to a June report in the Washington Post. About 34% of housekeepers, 24% of cooks and 20% of waitstaff employed by the US hotel industry is undocumented, according to the 2023 census.
Additional reporting by Maanvi Singh
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