DIAMONDHEAD, Miss.—Israel Makoka remembers four deep breaths. Slow breaths, in through the nose, out through the mouth, the kind he practiced daily as an athlete. These four breaths were all he had to calm himself, chains binding his ankles, wrists and belly.
“I thought I was having a mental breakdown,” the 18-year-old told this reporter on May 1, 2026, outside his home on the Gulf Coast. “I had all these thoughts going through my head.”
His younger brother, Max, split from him by the same April 21 ICE ambush that had taken him from his home as the two were trying to board their school bus in Diamondhead, Mississippi. His guardians, the Baptistes, whom he had last seen confronting those agents and facing threats of arrest themselves. His future as an exchange student in America, if he had one left. Mundane fears crept through, too. As ICE put him in the transport on the long road to Jena, Louisiana, he wondered what would happen if he had to scratch his head.
Israel is home now, back in Diamondhead with his friends and guardian family, recovering from his experience: the sudden punctuation of extraordinary rendition. In a week, the teenager went from a quiet suburb to perhaps the most notorious immigrant detention camp in America—and back. Most of the trip was spent in silence and prayer.
“I kept saying, ‘God, give me the strength to go through this,’” Israel recalled. “‘Give me the strength to go through this.’”
Israel Makoka was shackled for almost seven hours, an experience common for those caught up in ICE detention. At least he was spared the WRAP, an even more restrictive form of bondage, where detainees are cocooned in a black-and-yellow full-body restraint almost resembling mummification.
Those hours between Hancock County and the Central Louisiana ICE Processing Center in Jena, known as CLIPC, were the longest of Israel’s detention. And what came after was a different form of restraint.
‘We Need To Get Out Of This’
Much has been written of the detention blocks in which immigrants are housed in large facilities like CLIPC in Jena. Long barracks, fitting almost 100 detainees to a room, crowded and boisterous with noise and the constant churn of new arrivals and sudden departures. But it took Israel Makoka days to reach that part of his detention. When he arrived, he was ushered into a cell the size of a small living room, with 25 other people.
This was processing: the long integration of the newly arrested into the existing population of the detention center. The first night was marked by confusion and exhaustion. A scant few benches supported a couple of individuals who could sit. Nothing else was available. Eventually, Israel simply lay down on the floor with his shoes as a pillow. By the morning, guards brought in mattresses.
Those 48 hours were psychologically and physically taxing. One exposed toilet was available for the entire room. None of the detainees could shower.
“That was not good at all,” Israel said. “I was feeling really unwell.”
Israel was isolated, too. Virtually none of his fellow detainees spoke English. Only one, a Spanish-speaking man named Sergio, knew enough English to be a companion. Their time together was brief—only sharing a holding cell in Hancock County and processing at Jena, but the ability to commiserate was one of the few shaky pillars keeping Israel sane. The days of processing wore them both down to nubs.
Sergio grew anxious.
“Man, we need to get out of this,” he told Israel.
“How long could it take?” Israel recalled him saying. “We were trying to find a way to get through this,” he said back on the Coast. “I’m glad I was with Sergio, because we … I mean, when you complain with somebody else, you feel a little lighter.”
Nora Ahmed, legal director for the ACLU of Louisiana, told the Mississippi Free Press in a May 15 interview that Israel’s experience—especially the interminable processing time—is becoming more common as the detention system swells.
“It is not supposed to be standard practice, but it’s happening because the facilities themselves are overbooked,” Ahmed said. “They don’t have sufficient beds to put the folks who are coming in. But they’re still accepting the bodies because they get good federal money.”
That individuals like Israel Makoka are finding themselves backed up at Jena is likely the consequence of CLIPC’s relationship with another detention center in Alexandria, Louisiana, the only ICE facility in the country directly connected with an airport. Jena has become the staging ground for Alexandria, which is itself the port of final departure for many immigrants in the United States.
“ And of course, for those people who don’t have federal habeas representation,” Ahmed said, “a lot of those individuals are being unlawfully deported without being able to vindicate their constitutional rights or to articulate fear.”
After the days of compacted detention in the processing room, Israel and Sergio were parted, sent off to different blocks. Israel found himself in a room with roughly 90 other detainees, a spartan but much more livable setting. His own bunk, however uncomfortable, had space to move around, even limited entertainment. Once a day, for a single hour, they were allowed outside—the first time Israel had seen the sun in days.
“That’s the thing I’ve missed the most,” he said. “Being outside, you know?”
‘I Wanna Leave Here’
While Israel Makoka settled into the routine at Jena, his brother Max was living a much different, but no less surreal experience. He’d been split from his brother shortly after their arrest, at a facility near their coastal home in Diamondhead. Then, like many underage immigrants in the United States, he was separated from his family and taken by two Office of Refugee Resettlement agents to New Orleans, where he boarded a commercial flight with Delta.
The 15-year-old felt a sense of resignation wash over him.
“I was confused,” he recalled in an interview with the Mississippi Free Press on May 1. “I didn’t really ask any questions. I just thought, wherever they’re gonna bring me, I’m just gonna be there, because … I have no choice.”
Max was informed of very little during his trip.
“They said there’s a shelter, that you’re gonna be there some days, and then you’d go back to your country,” he said.
The shelter—a youth home near Houston, Texas—was significantly more accommodating than the sparse detention camp his older brother was in back east. They had bunk beds in their rooms, showers, a soccer field for outdoor exercise and even enjoyed a single day in a park. But movement was restricted. Hour after hour, Max followed the schedule allotted to him.
Like Israel, Max found himself isolated in a system almost entirely purposed for Spanish speakers. “ Even the workers don’t really speak English. There was one—and that was the only one I was really talking to because he spoke English,” Max said.
His roommate, a boy from Dallas, spoke a little bit of English and helped translate for Max through his stay.
These institutions are intended to keep detained children in a regular routine, educating them in spite of their circumstances. But in Max’s experience, the routine was enforced even when the education was not. “We’d wake up at 6 a.m., go to a classroom, eat breakfast, and we were supposed to have some classes, but most days we didn’t,” he said. “We just stayed there, doing nothing. Staring at the wall.”
Isolated from anyone who could converse with him, trapped in a routine with no purpose, Max’s thoughts turned to home. “I had my head in my hands, just saying to myself, ‘I wanna leave here. I wanna go back home to my family.”
‘Just Let Me Go Sign The Paper’
For adult detainees, the pressure is even more extreme. Israel saw it regularly during his week in Jena. “ It got to the point where people were just so tired they’d say, ‘OK, you know what? I’m gonna just get deported. Sign the paper. Just let me go sign the paper,’” he said.
Even before he was processed, immediately upon his arrest, Israel said ICE agents were pressuring him to take the expedited route home by waiving his rights to a defense.
“He handed me the paper and said, ‘You sign that paper, you’re gonna get deported, and you will get some money. It’s a lot of money. You can go and come back next year,’” the Hancock High School student recalled.
Israel scanned the document, barely understanding the restrictions. He noticed that if he’d been out of status for more than 100 days, he’d be banned from the country for three years. But it had been only hours since he’d discovered he’d been out of status at all. He asked how long that had been. The agent said he didn’t know.
A representative for ICE did not respond to requests for comment by press time.
“ It’s happening everywhere,” the Louisiana ACLU’s Nora Ahmed said. “It’s even happening when people know they’re going to be released from detention, this pressure to tell people, ‘Hey, you should just self-deport and just sign this piece of paper.’ People are being coerced into those signatures in various ways.”
Agreeing to self-deportation does not guarantee a speedy removal from the country, Ahmed stressed.
“ You’ve waived your rights, not really clear about what those rights are. And there’s the underlying problem: everybody needs access to counsel,” she said.
Israel’s experience is standard operating procedure for detained migrants in the U.S. deportation regime, she continued.
“What’s happening here is we’re having an outright assault on people’s constitutional rights. (The government) claims that this is civil immigration detention just as a means of getting around the Sixth Amendment right to counsel,” Ahmed said. “But when we are talking about immigration detention, we have labeled that civil, (not criminal).”
This practice neatly sidesteps the basic right for anyone in bondage to seek legal redress, she explained.
“I would argue this is for the pure purpose of ensuring that people do not have a right to counsel. Because it allows for this atrocious illegality that we see taking place, this ability to talk to people, people who often have no idea what the law is, and to tell them anything,” Ahmed said. “Because their order is, ‘Just get them to sign this,’ and then they can report up the chain, ‘Look how many people we have on queue for deportation.’”
None of it mattered in the first place. Israel and Max, who first arrived in the U.S. in 2023 and 2024, respectively, hail from the Republic of Congo, a country currently on President Donald Trump’s 2025 travel ban. If Israel had accepted self-deportation, he would have had no path back. He had no legal representation, no ability to consult his family or his legal guardians, barely any time to think. He demanded a hearing.
The Long Drive Home
The taking of Israel and Max Makoka is a story that has grown common in the United States in the second Trump administration. Their experiences in detention—the cold and the claustrophobia, the confusion and the fear—are arbitrary horrors familiar to the system and long predating the Trump administration.
The release of brothers, accomplished by the sudden scrutiny of local and national attention, the outcry of an entire community and the intervention of both of Mississippi’s U.S. senators, is as rare as their arrest was standard.
Israel discovered his freedom was soon coming out of the blue. “ I was in my bed and an ICE officer just called my name. Somebody reached out for me,” he said.
“OK, you’re gonna be released tomorrow,” the officer told him. He didn’t give him a reason. The officer simply asked for his sponsor’s name.
Israel was exhausted. But once he found out his release was imminent, he lost the ability to stay still. “I called Miss Gail that night. I said, I’m not sleeping until you come here,” he said.
Max was similarly blindsided by news of his release. “We have a case manager, someone who makes calls for me, for my family and stuff,” he said. “He called me in his office and he said, ‘Somebody called me, so you’re leaving tomorrow. Your brother will come and get you.’”
Gail Baptiste got in the car almost the moment she was informed she could go get the Makoka brothers. Cliff couldn’t miss work, so Stacey Campbell, Israel’s teacher, came with her. They drove to Jena, then to Houston, then back to Diamondhead. It was 10:30 at night when they arrived, only hours before Israel’s last day of school. He left his home for one detour before going to sleep in his own bed again: he went to his friend Brody’s for a haircut.
“I knew the next day we had to go to school. So I was like, ‘OK, people are gonna take pictures,’” Israel said, smiling wryly. “So I had to look good.”
It had been one week, there and back again.
The next day came, and the brothers returned to Hancock High School. Israel had missed the tradition of receiving his graduation robes from his teachers. But he was there for the parade, the seniors going from class to class to be celebrated by the rest of the student body. For Israel, it was a homecoming.
“I had like, a thousand hugs that day,” he said, laughing. “Everybody was happy to see me.”
And today, on May 15, at the Hancock High senior assembly, the student body erupted into cheers loud enough to shake the walls when Israel’s name was announced.
Max had a similar experience. “My first block was my math teacher. And when she saw me, she almost cried,” he said.
The future for both brothers in the United States is still in jeopardy. In spite of their treatment, they want to remain with the Baptistes, to stay in the U.S. and pursue their dreams of higher education. Though both excel at basketball, professional sports are not their ultimate goal.
“ I just want to study—get my diploma, and that’s it. That’s all I want. I just want to go to school and get educated,” Israel said. “The education here is better than anywhere else.”
Israel, who is set to graduate from Hancock High School on May 22, is planning to study political science wherever he may end up, with a dream of one day becoming a diplomat. Max wants to pursue computer science with a focus in cybersecurity.
“I have a college I want to go to. I want to study at the University of Texas in Austin,” he said.
In support, the community has set up a GoFundMe for the cost of their schooling, in Hancock County and beyond.
‘No Matter What Obstacle Comes’
It is clear, from the stories Israel and Max Makoka shared, that the events of their detention are sudden burdens they have yet to fully grasp how to bear. They carry that weight uneasily, nothing more than the knowledge that their stories are just two among millions—some detained, some deported, some desperate to come home again.
To the Makokas and the Baptistes, their guardians, their detention remains an utterly senseless act. They were waiting for the school bus when they were detained, living at the house where a judge had granted them guardianship. No deception, no hiding, no illegal entry or alleged crimes. A school transfer is all that lay between them and legal status. The Mississippi Free Press previously reported that the decision to move from the Piney Woods School in central Mississippi to Hancock High School, a public school, was at the heart of the Makokas’ fall out of status.
“ All of this is just trying to sap the will to live out of all immigrants in this country,” the Louisiana ACLU’s Nora Ahmed said. “Even for people who aren’t caught in the detention system, it’s just to understand that your family will be tortured and we’ll come for you next.”
Israel and Max’s detention came at a price—not just to them, but to the government that saw fit to detain them before simply making a phone call to their place of residence about their status. For Israel, that cost is particularly lucrative.
Public data on the cost of detention at CLIPC is outdated. In 2022, the going rate in Jena was $76.64 per day, per body. Contemporary figures are no longer available, after the Trump administration’s declaration of a border emergency in 2025 allowed corporations like CoreCivic and the GEO Group to pursue no-bid contracts. Evidence suggests that the number may have as much as doubled by this year. The average daily cost of detention in 2026 is $152 per person, based on the limited information available.
Israel thinks of Sergio, his friend during the early days of his detention. No miraculous release from Jena is likely to await him, nor any of the countless other immigrants Israel witnessed filtering in and out of his cell block in the facility. For Max, a boy from Colombia comes to mind, one who told him he’d been in custody for roughly two years.
“ It is commonly happening. I mean, even during the Biden administration, we found an (adult) woman who’d been detained for six and a half years,” Ahmed said. “The ugly part about immigration detention is that, though the eyes of the American population are opening up, sadly, none of this is new.”
For the Baptistes, the experience has been sobering. On reflection, they shudder to think of how much worse the situation could have gone.
Without the commotion that had preceded Israel and Max’s arrest, said Cliff Baptiste, “the other way would’ve been they would’ve driven up, flashed their badges, grabbed the boys, threw them in the car—gone. We would’ve thought they were at school until we came home and they didn’t show up.”
Gail Baptiste told the Mississippi Free Press that local support mattered a great deal to secure the brothers’ release.
“Everybody we know called everybody they could,” she said. “It took so many people to get us to this point. And we have hope now—hope of reinstatement, for the boys to continue their education here.”
Israel said the experience made him realize “that we are much stronger than we think we are.”
“There’s resilience that we’re carrying in ourselves, we don’t even know we have,” he said.
Both brothers are still grappling with the gravity of their experiences. But they are undeterred—wanting to stay in America, to continue with the path they’ve been on and remain in the community they’ve come to love. Their community is no small part of that.
“No matter what obstacle comes or what will come on my road, I’m still gonna stay even-keeled and keep going,” Israel said. “And I’m closer to God as well. I realize how God is consistent, how he always shows up, even when we feel like he is not here.”
Read more of the Mississippi Free Press’ immigration coverage, including the first stories about the Makokas’ detention and then their return, at mfp.ms/immigration.
