Louisiana

Footprint of solitary confinement in Louisiana expands because of ICE use of isolation | The Lens

Published

2 months ago

January 20, 2026

Footprint of solitary confinement in Louisiana expands because of ICE use of isolation | The Lens

Kiana Calloway spent nearly two decades in prison, entering the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola when he was 17 years old.

For roughly nine of the next 17 years, he was incarcerated in solitary confinement, including a year-and-a-half stint in Angola’s notorious punishment camp, Camp J, for “aggravated disobedience.”

An empty cell-block cell from the House of Detention jail building in New Orleans. Kiana Calloway was held alone in similar cells at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola and also was confined in solitary for 23 hours a day in a 6-foot by 9-foot, one-man cell in Angola’s Camp J punishment camp that affected his hearing and vision.

One Sunday in 1998, he came back from visiting his family in the visiting shed. As usual, he went through the line to be searched on the way back to his dorm, but then was ordered into the security booth for another cavity search. He refused, was charged with “aggravated disobedience” and sent to Camp J.

Even today, 15 years after his release, the darkness from that time feels close.

“Isolation hurts,” said Calloway, now 48. “Isolation puts you in a state of despair, loneliness and darkness.”

His cell door had 28 bars, he says. It’s a detail that held his attention as he spent hours analyzing every inch of the space. Inside, water for the toilet and sink flowed through the same incoming pipe, distracting him from the deafening sound of iron doors and the cries of mental distress around him.

Even today, if he hears the loud flush of a stainless steel toilet, he is instantly carried back there in his mind.

Calloway, a native of Harvey, doesn’t want anyone else going through that darkness. After his release, he began trying to convince prisons and jails to stop housing people in solitary, through a group called Impacted Solitary Survivors Council, or ISSC.

His work as a human-rights activist had to start in his own backyard, Calloway said, because Louisiana is the “world’s capital for solitary confinement.”

1 in 5 people held in solitary in Louisiana, one snapshot showed

In 2017, 19% of men in state prisons—or 2,709 people—reported spending more than two weeks in solitary confinement, according to Louisiana on Lockdown, a report by Solitary Watch. (Illustration by The Lens.)

When the Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections conducted a full count in the fall of 2017, 19% of men in state prisons – a total of 2,709 people – reported that they’d been in solitary confinement for more than two weeks, according to Louisiana on Lockdown, a report by Solitary Watch.

The rate of people in solitary in Louisiana was more than double the next state’s average and four times the national average.

Because of ISSC’s advocacy, the DOC expanded out-of-cell time for people held in administrative segregation and changed one of the reasons people were put in solitary: a catch-all category in prison rulebook, called Rule 30, and its subsection, 30W, which allowed people to be held in solitary — known as “the dungeon” — for weeks at a time for “any behavior … that may impair or threaten the security or stability of the unit or well-being of an employee, visitor, guest, offender or their families.”

But despite any achievements with the DOC, the footprint of solitary confinement within Louisiana seems to be expanding because of the state’s growing network of ICE dentition facilities, some of which are shuttered state prisons repurposed to hold immigrants. Tracking the situation is difficult, because detainees are often transferred quickly, Calloway said. “We don’t really know who’s in there and how many are in there.”.

Plus, solitary is still widely used in state prisons and local jails, here in Louisiana and across the nation.

At least 1,222,840 people are locked daily in solitary confinement in U.S. prisons and jails for 22 or more hours a day, according to Calculating Torture, a report by Solitary Watch.

They’re held for months or years at a time — and often for punishment, according to Prison Policy Initiative research.

But even short stays in solitary confinement can have serious psychological and physical effects.

That puts people with mental-health conditions in grave danger, said Andrea Armstrong, a law professor at Loyola University New Orleans who studies death in jails and prisons through the Incarceration Transparency project. “The number of completed suicides that are occurring in segregation or solitary cells is really astounding,” she said.

Lasting effects as brains change from solitary

Depth perception in vision vanished for Angola 3 member Albert Woodfox, who spent 43 years in a 6-foot by 9-foot cell – as recounted in his Pulitzer Prize-nominated book, Solitary: Unbroken by Four Decades in Solitary Confinement.

Woodfox’s physical impacts went far beyond the terms of his imprisonment, Armstrong emphasizes. “Nobody ever sentenced him to losing a portion of his eyesight because of the conditions in which he was housed.”

Those beyond-punishment effects are part of the reason that the United Nations takes the position that “prolonged” solitary confinement, for more than 15 consecutive days, amounts to psychological torture.

Long after release, people suffer long-term effects because of sensory deprivation and exposure to extremes. The brain itself changes during solitary confinement. If the brain has little stimulation, it creates its own distortions. If it is exposed to extremes like bright lights ir loud noise, the brain heightens or blurs its reactions to outside stimuli.

For a long time, the way Calloway perceived the world was altered. “By being in a cell so long, it took time for my eyes to dilate properly,” he said.

His hearing too, suffered. “It took a while for my ears to get back adapted to hearing birds chirping or the small things.”

Woodfox and the other two members of the Angola Three, Herman Wallace and Robert Hillary King, became known worldwide for their philosophical responses to spending most of their adult lives in solitary. As Woodfox wrote, he had seen the worst, but chose to hold onto the good. “I have witnessed the horrors of man’s cruelty to man. I did not lose my humanity,” Woodfox wrote. “I bear the scars of beatings, loneliness, isolation and persecution. I am also marked by every kindness.”

Calloway, who was mentored by Woodfox, remembers his focus on the positive. “Every day, in Camp J, he would be the first to pop up and tell everyone ‘Good morning,’” he said. “At night, he’d tell everyone ‘Good evening.’”

Similarly, Calloway focused his mind on thinking through big topics and imagining better places. “Your mind is one thing that can’t be put in shackles and handcuffs,” he said. “If I didn’t have the opportunity to harness my mind and my imagination, to think that something good would come out of this, I would be one of the many people who lost their minds in there.”

Touring solitary-confinement bus stops at Loyola

A social-justice bus known as the “Journey to Justice” is parked on the campus of Loyola University in New Orleans during a stop on its national tour to end solitary confinement. (Photo by Gus Bennett | The Lens)

Recently, a social-justice bus called “Journey to Justice” stopped at Loyola University for a day, as part of a national tour to end solitary confinement. The bus contained some exhibits and a cell replicating the exact size and furnishings of a solitary cell.

Calloway, who works at the Jesuit Social Research Institute on the Loyola campus, spoke with students and local residents as part of the visit. The goal was “humanizing what incarceration looks like” and helping students see that they can push for change, he said.

*Naquasia Jones | Photo courtesy of Pure Legacee*

Naquasia Jones, 42, the outreach coordinator for the National Religious Campaign Against Torture survivors’ network, also spoke at Loyola about her time in prison, which included 60 days in solitary at the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility in New York, when her only human contact was with correctional officers.

While in Bedford Hills, Jones also spent an entire year on lockdown – when an entire tier is “locked down” for 23 hours, given only one hour of yard-phone-shower time each day. The time tested her mental strength, she said. “It’s designed to break you.”

Some Loyola students walked out of the Journey to Justice bus feeling profound effects.

Students stand inside the “Journey to Justice” social-justice bus during a stop at Loyola University in New Orleans, examining exhibits focused on solitary confinement and mass incarceration. (Photo by Gus Bennett | The Lens)

“They’re allowed to do that to people? It just feels very wrong. Tortuous and inhumane,” said Indie Petitto, 20, a Loyola senior, who walked into the solitary cell and read through the Journey to Justice exhibits about the practice.

Petitto felt physically weak. “As I was on the bus, I felt my legs shaking the whole time,” she said.

As a teen, Calloway is placed directly in solitary

In 1994, when Calloway was 16, he was arrested and wrongfully charged with robbing and killing a pregnant woman and her boyfriend in the Woodmere subdivision in Harvey.

In 1996, he was convicted of first-degree murder, given a life sentence, and shipped from Jefferson Parish jail to Angola.

Once there, he moved in and out of “ad seg,” administrative segregation, a working cell-block where he served time alone or with one cellmate. He was sent to the cell-blocks for a range of reasons, often small. For instance, when he was in the fields, he was ordered to pick okra, which sent his arms itching to the point where he refused to continue.

He was often in and out of the cell-block. For not having his shoes lined up under his bed. For having too many cans of tunafish. And for making a three-way phone call, asking his mom to call his brother.

That’s important to understand, Armstrong said. “I think the public thinks about solitary as a place exclusively for people who have serious or significant disciplinary issues. Instead, she said, “people are housed in solitary for a number of reasons — suicide watch, protective custody, medical issues, administrative detention, or even minor offenses.”

Calloway learned how to pull himself back whenever he lost hope. But the depth of his despair often tugged at him. “There have been many times where I deemed like ‘Why am I here? I should just kill myself.’”

The isolation units were narrow cells with solid concrete walls on three sides and bars on the fourth side, at the front, next to the door with 28 bars.

He was only allowed a limited amount of personal belongings – an orange jumper, shower slippers, and underwear.

Because of the prevalence of mental illness in Camp J, some men became known for strange behavior. “Some individuals would start throwing human feces or urine throughout the cell,” Calloway said. Others would make darts and let them sit in human feces for weeks at a time. If a dart pierced the skin, it could cause gangrene, other Camp J residents discovered.

“There were times, man, when I would wake up in the middle of the night to individuals bamming their heads on the walls. Boom, boom, boom,” Calloway said. “From the outside looking in, you can see the individuals are dealing with mental-health issues. Why are they in these cells?”

Twenty-three hours in, one hour out
In solitary, there are no classes or programs. Each man is allowed only one hour out of his cell daily to make a phone call or take a shower after 23 hours inside the cell, a schedule known as 23-1.

“I think of solitary as like a prison within a prison,” Armstrong said. “It is one of the most highly controlled spaces. Often, you’re not allowed to have pens or pencils or regular bed sheets. And yet, despite that control, in our data, we see that a substantial portion of suicides are occurring in solitary cells, particularly in jails.”

The harms of solitary confinement were carried over from another system that routinely used solitary to punish Black people: enslavement. In the book Twelve Years a Slave, for instance, Solomon Northrop was kept chained in isolation.

“The systems are structured and designed to deteriorate and demoralize the individual,” Calloway said. “We know that incarceration is a direct descendant of slavery. In appearance, Angola, Louisiana, still looks like a slave plantation. They didn’t change the name — just turned it into a prison.”

Working to reform policies that lead to solitary confinement

*A solitary confinement cell. (Photo courtesy of the ACLU.)*

Calloway’s conviction was overturned in 1998, after the Louisiana Fifth Circuit Court of Appeal in Gretna granted post-conviction relief, vacating his first-degree murder convictions and life sentences, and remanding the case for a new trial. This led to follow-up trials and a manslaughter conviction with a 34-year prison sentence. He would serve 17 years before he was granted parole.

After his release in 2011, Calloway began working with the Jesuit Social Research Institute to help the DOC rethink disciplinary policies and support those who have endured solitary confinement.

“Locking up individuals inside cages and expecting them to come home ready to function, that’s a threat to public safety,” he said.

A man released home to Jefferson Parish directly from extended lockdown at Allen Correctional Center about a decade ago serves as a tragic reminder of the continued harms of lockdown. Within months of the man’s release, Calloway saw the man on TV news, arrested for killing his girlfriend and her children, Calloway said.

After that tragedy, the Department of Public Safety acknowledged that releasing people directly from solitary onto the street was an issue — “and the only reason they knew that was because they were tracking their own operations,” said Armstrong, who believes that DOC data on solitary’s use — and its effects — should be released, to enhance public safety.

These days, within and outside of his work, Calloway’s life is broad and wide and accomplished.

He has worked on Inside, the Valley Sings, an animated film that’s on the long list to be nominated for an Oscar in 2026. A different film, a feature documentary called Kiana’s Mission, is now complete and will be screened in the upcoming Sundance Film Festival.

And across the state, Calloway now trains formerly incarcerated people to lead reform efforts focused on rehabilitation. That work includes a digital tool designed to guide people returning home. “If we invest in building people and divest from harming them we’ll have a better society,” he said.

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Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry calls for amendment for teacher pay raises

Published

10 hours ago

March 10, 2026

Press Room

Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry calls for amendment for teacher pay raises

Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry proposed a constitutional amendment for permanent teacher pay raises.
Landry’s address also supported an eventual elimination of the state income tax.
The governor’s budget includes an $82 million increase for corrections services following recent tough-on-crime laws.
Landry advocated for doubling the funding for his LA Gator school choice program.

BATON ROUGE — Gov. Jeff Landry advocated for a constitutional amendment that would create a permanent teacher pay raise as well as an eventual elimination of the state income tax in an opening address to the Louisiana Legislature on Monday.

Landry pushed for the passage of Proposed Amendment 3 on the May 2026 ballot to free up money for teacher pay raises.

He said the amendment would pay down longstanding debt within the Teachers’ Retirement System of Louisiana and enable the state to afford a permanent increase in teacher income. The proposed increases are $2,250 for teachers and $1,125 for support staff.

“With a ‘yes’ vote, we can strengthen the retirement system, improve their take-home pay, and guess what? We can do it without raising taxes,” Landry said.

A bill proposing the elimination of the state income tax, which takes in about $4 billion annually, was pre-filed earlier in the year by Rep. Danny McCormick, R-Oil City. Where the money will come from to supplement the loss is currently unclear.

McCormick said in an interview with the LSU Manship School News Service that to encourage more young adults to stay in Louisiana, “we need to do away with the state income tax.”

“This is a conversation piece that hopefully we can figure out where to make cuts in the government so we can get the people their money back,” McCormick said.

But Senate President Cameron Henry, R-Metairie, said at a luncheon at the Baton Rouge Press Club that if the Legislature “can be disciplined” this session, residents could anticipate a 0.5% decrease in state income tax during next year’s session. He also said bigger tax cuts have to be planned over a longer budget cycle.

Within education changes, Landry commended the placing of the Ten Commandments in classrooms, approved by the Louisiana Supreme Court in a decision handed down last week.

“You have staked the flag of morality by recognizing that the Ten Commandments are not a bad way to live your life,” Landry said. “Students who don’t read them will likely read the criminal code.”

Landry’s budget proposed an $82 million increase for corrections services following 2024 tough-on-crime legislation that eliminated parole and probation, increased sentencing and encouraged harsher punishments.

Landry directed his criticism toward the New Orleans criminal justice system, which he feels is lacking accountability, especially in courtrooms.

“Judges hold enormous power, but they are not social workers with a gavel,” he said. “They are the final gatekeepers of public safety.”

The Orleans Parish criminal justice system relies on state and local funding stemming from revenues from fees imposed on those arrested, according to the Vera Institute. Landry said the state spends twice as much on the Orleans system as it does in East Baton Rouge Parish, the largest parish in the state.

“Being special does not mean being exempt from accountability,” Landry said.

Overall, Landry pushed for fewer and different ideas compared to the sweeping agenda he laid out at the start of previous legislative sessions. Henry mentioned at the Baton Rouge Press Club that the governor would like for this session to be a “member-driven session instead of an administrative session.”

Landry spoke only in general terms about his proposal for more funding for LA Gator, his program to let parents use state money to send their children to private schools.

“We must find a path so that the hard-earned money of parents follow their child to the education of their choice,” he said.

He has proposed doubling funding for the LA Gator program from $44 million a year to $88.2 million. The likelihood of this occurring is yet to be seen, as prominent lawmakers such as Sen. Henry are hesitant to approve an increase in funding.

Landry similarly did not mention carbon capture projects, despite the issue gaining traction from affected parish residents and lawmakers.

House Speaker Phillip DeVillier, R-Eunice, told the Baton Rouge Press Club last week that 22 bills have been filed in the House that he would consider “anti-carbon capture.”

Landry also cited data centers and other giant industrial development projects and touted his administration’s success in bringing more jobs to Louisiana and in helping to lower insurance premiums over the past year.

“May we continue to employ courage over comfort, and if we do, there is really no limit to what we can do for Louisiana,” Landry said.

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Louisiana’s LNG exports are driving out fishermen and driving up utility bills across the U.S.

Published

22 hours ago

March 9, 2026

Press Room

Louisiana’s LNG exports are driving out fishermen and driving up utility bills across the U.S.

Phillip Dyson once tried working a job that wasn’t shrimping. He lasted three days on an oil rig before going right back to his boat.

“The man said, you just tell me you want the job, we’ll fire the other guy,” he said with a laugh. “I said, don’t fire that man, ’cause I ain’t coming back.”

For more than half a century, Dyson has been fishing the coastal waters of Cameron, Louisiana. Forty years ago, Cameron Parish was the top seafood port in the United States. Today, it’s ground zero for America’s LNG export boom, a multibillion-dollar industry — the U.S. is the top exporter in the world — that has reshaped the landscape, the economy, and the daily lives of the people who have lived here for generations.

When Dyson looks out from the shrimp dock now, he doesn’t recognize what he sees: spindly cranes, cylindrical cooling towers and the constant hum of the construction and processing of liquified natural gas (LNG) terminals rising above the marsh.

Ian McKenna

More Perfect Union

Phillip Dyson stands on the shrimp dock in Cameron, Louisiana, on Friday, January 23, 2026. Dyson said falling shrimp catches are driving many out of the industry. He doesn’t want to leave Cameron, but he may have to in order to keep working.

The terminals run day and night, super-cooling natural gas into liquid form where it’s loaded onto massive tanker ships for export to places like Europe and Asia.

Shrimpers like Dyson are catching about half of what they used to, driving many out of the industry.

“There used to be 200 shrimp boats in this town — down to 15,” Dyson said. “You went from a fishing town to a town that didn’t care less about the fishermen.”

Dyson is stubborn and set in his ways. Shrimping is all he knows. He doesn’t want to leave Cameron. He buried his parents here. Scattered his daughter’s ashes in the water.

“I would never want to leave her behind,” he said. “But I’m gonna have to.”

‘You’re just surrounded’

An aerial view of an LNG export terminal in Cameron, Louisiana, on Friday, January 23, 2026.

Cameron Parish was an attractive destination for reasons both geographic and financial. It sits close to the Haynesville Shale formation, one of the country’s most productive natural gas fields, has no parish-wide sales tax and LNG companies have secured industrial tax exemptions that, according to community advocates, amount to nearly a billion dollars a year across the three operating terminals — roughly $6 million per permanent job created.

“They don’t only export gas — they export the profits,” said James Hiatt, a former oil and gas worker who founded For a Better Bayou, a southwest Louisiana environmental community organization. “That’s the key.”

The company at the center of the expansion is Venture Global, which operates the Calcasieu Pass terminal, known as CP1, just outside of Cameron. In a March earnings call, the company reported it made more than $6 billion in 2025 alone — tripling its profits from the previous year.

In an interview last year on CNBC, Venture Global’s CEO, Mike Sabel, described the company in terms residents find difficult to square with their daily reality: “Ultimately our business is that we manufacture and operate machines that produce money.”

President Donald Trump’s administration approved a second Venture Global terminal in Cameron — CP2 — just two months after taking office in 2025. Nationally, 17 new export terminals are either under construction or have won approval from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC). Six of them are in southwest Louisiana.

Robyn Thigpen, a local resident and executive director of the advocacy group Fishermen Involved in Saving Our Heritage (FISH), described the sense of encirclement many people feel.

“When you turn here,” she said, pointing in different directions from the beach in Cameron, “the cranes off in the distance is the expansion to CP1. 12 miles back into town is Hackberry LNG. Probably about 30 miles this direction is Sabine LNG. So you’re just surrounded.”

‘No shrimper can make it here’

Tad Theriot drives his boat out to check his oyster cages in Cameron, Louisiana, on Friday, January 23, 2026. Theriot had already largely pivoted from shrimping to oyster farming because of falling shrimp catches. He said at least half of his oysters died after a Venture Global dredge spill in summer 2025.

Last August, while Venture Global was dredging a shipping channel at CP1 — pumping out mud and sediment to clear a path for vessels — something went wrong. The company spilled hundreds of acres of sediment into the surrounding marsh.

The mud blanketed the area where Tad Theriot, a shrimper turned oysterman, had been growing his harvest. He pivoted to oyster farming two years ago, after years of declining shrimp catches made the traditional livelihood impossible to sustain.

The dredge spill devastated his oyster operation almost overnight.

“Half of them died,” Theriot said. “We lost 50% on the big ones, even more than that.”

Out on the water, the evidence was plain — oysters pulled from cages bore what his farming partner Sky Leger called “mud blisters,” deposits of silt visible inside the shell.

Sky Leger points to “mud blisters” — deposits of silt — inside a freshly opened oyster in Cameron, Louisiana, on Friday, January 23, 2026. Leger said the mud blisters ruin the oysters that were meant to be sold to local restaurants.

“Before you try, tell me — would you eat it if you knew that that was there?” Leger said, pointing to dark splotches on the iridescent cup of a fresh oyster. “How does that get there?”

Venture Global told More Perfect Union and Gulf States Newsroom in a statement that the “isolated discharge was quickly contained,” and that there were “no significant offsite impacts” as a result of the spill.

The Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries documented increased oyster mortality near the spill site in September, and fishermen have since requested a more comprehensive government study.

To date, no significant enforcement action has been taken against the company.

But according to documents obtained by More Perfect Union, Venture Global offered some affected fishermen $20,000 — on the condition they could never sue or speak negatively about the company again. When asked about the offer, Venture Global said the company “has communicated directly” with local fishermen “to develop mitigation and remediation plans, and minimize the potential for an event like this again.”

Theriot said he’d never take the money.

“That’s not right,” he said flatly. “I have hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of oysters. I want hundreds of thousands of dollars.”

Advocates like Hiatt called the settlement offers part of a pattern the company is using to sidestep accountability through financial and political power.

“After this spill, more people are understanding that these corporations don’t give a f— about you,” he said. “All they care about is how much money they can make.”

Last month, a pipeline part of an under-construction project operated by Delfin LNG ruptured near Holly Beach in Cameron Parish. The ensuing explosion resulted in “catastrophic injuries” to a contractor working for the company, according to a lawsuit filed in Texas that accused the company of negligence and failing to “ensure the pipeline was free of flammable vapors and materials.”

“It’s a reminder that these things are happening in a community that doesn’t even have a hospital,” Thigpen said, noting that the worker was taken to a hospital in Port Arthur, Texas, roughly 45 minutes away. “It’s another example of why we can’t trust these companies to do the right thing.”

‘You can’t afford this and food’

Signs outside a Venture Global LNG export terminal in Cameron, Louisiana, on Friday, January 23, 2026. Two months after taking office, President Trump approved a second Venture Global terminal in Cameron.

The impacts of Cameron’s transformation don’t stop at the bayou’s edge. The LNG export boom is being felt in the utility bills of Americans across the country.

Eight LNG export terminals now consume more natural gas each day than all 74 million American households connected to gas utility service combined. The federal government projects the benchmark price of natural gas will average 22% higher in 2026 than in 2025, citing LNG exports as a driving factor.

A Public Citizen analysis found domestic natural gas prices were $12 billion higher for residential customers in just the first nine months of 2025 compared to the same period the year before — roughly $124 per household.

“It’s simple supply and demand,” Slocum said. “You’re forcing Americans to compete with their counterparts in Berlin and Beijing for access to U.S. natural gas. And that pushes the domestic price up. The more we export, the higher the prices the rest of Americans will pay to heat and cool their homes.”

In Hackberry, Louisiana — minutes down the road from Cameron Parish’s other export terminal — fisherman Eddie Lejuine and his wife Michelle have watched their bills climb. Lejuine depends on a refrigerated storage container to keep his catch marketable. Without it, he can’t work.

“You can’t afford this and food,” Michelle Lejuine said. “What are you gonna do? You gonna eat or are you gonna have electricity?”

Eddie Lejuine put it plainly: “We’re catching less fish, [making] less money, paying higher bills.”

Trump’s promise, the industry’s windfall

President Donald Trump gestures after stepping off Air Force One, Saturday, March 7, 2026, at Miami International Airport in Miami.

During the 2024 campaign, Trump pledged to cut Americans’ energy bills in half within 12 months. He repeated it at rallies and put it in writing in a Newsweek op-ed.

On his first day back in the White House, one of his earliest executive orders undid former President Joe Biden’s pause on pending LNG export approvals — a pause that was implemented, in part, because consumer advocates argued the existing review process failed to account for domestic price impacts.

The ties between Venture Global and the Trump administration run deep. According to reporting by the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post, the company’s CEO was present at a private 2024 meeting at which Trump reportedly asked oil and gas executives to contribute $1 billion to his campaign.

Slocum argued the gap between Trump’s promise and his policy is not an accident.

“What Trump has done is to prioritize the financial interests of the natural gas industry,” he said. “And the natural gas industry’s primary financial directive is to maximize LNG exports.”

Electricity prices jumped 6.9% in 2025 year over year, according to Goldman Sachs.

‘Find somewhere else to build this’

Phillip Dyson loads and prepares his shrimp boat in Cameron, Louisiana, on Friday, January 23, 2026. Dyson said there were once more than 200 shrimp boats parked along the dock. Now, it’s down to around 15.

More than 90% of Cameron Parish voted for Trump in 2024. The mood among the fishermen who remain is harder to categorize than partisan politics.

When asked if he’d vote for Trump again, Lejuine said: “No, I’m not. I’m hoping we have a better selection of something.”

Hiatt, a self-described third-generation oil and gas worker, framed it as a matter of basic fairness rather than ideology.

“This is ‘America Last’ policy,” he said, “to export our natural resources to the highest bidder at the expense of every American.”

Dyson, standing at the dock in the late afternoon light, said what he would tell Venture Global and the politicians like Trump and Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry, who championed the expansion: “Find somewhere else to build this s—. I never thought I’d have seen this place like this. Never in my lifetime.”

His electricity bill runs $350 to $500 a month for a 990-square-foot house, he said. He and his wife receive about $1,300 a month together on Social Security. With what he’s catching, it’s not enough.

He said he won’t stop shrimping, but he can’t do it in Cameron.

“This is what I do. That’s what I’m gonna do till they throw dirt on me. That might not be here, but I will fish till it’s over.”

This story was produced by the Gulf States Newsroom, a collaboration between Mississippi Public Broadcasting, WBHM in Alabama, WWNO and WRKF in Louisiana and NPR. This story was produced in collaboration with More Perfect Union.

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More Storms Monday – Severe Storms Possible by Midweek

Published

1 day ago

March 9, 2026

Press Room

More Storms Monday – Severe Storms Possible by Midweek

(KMDL-FM) You might not have realized it, but you’re on a roller coaster. No, not the kind of roller coaster you look forward to riding, but the kind of roller coaster only Mother Nature can devise in the form of Louisiana’s annual up and down weather conditions, also known as spring.

READ MORE: Louisiana Parishes That Have the Most Tornadoes

Much of Louisiana was affected by strong storms with heavy rains and gusty winds during the day on Saturday and extending into Sunday morning. By later afternoon yesterday, conditions had improved, and it looked as though the work and school week would be off to a much calmer start.

Heavy Rain Possible in Louisiana To Start the Work Week

The start of the work and school day will be much calmer; however, the ride home on this first day of “extra sunlight” thanks to Daylight Saving Time will include a decent chance of showers and storms. Oh, and there are already reports of thick fog.

So, after a foggy start this morning, you could be picking up kids from school or driving yourself home from work in a torrential downpour. And you’ll get to do all of this while you’re mentally addled from the twice-a-year time change.

Rain chances are listed at 50% for this afternoon, but they do taper off quickly after the sun goes down. The Weather Prediction Center is forecasting a slight risk of an excessive rain event for portions of Louisiana later today. The area of concern is generally along and well north of US 190.

When Is The Next Threat of Severe Storms in Louisiana?

Tuesday should be a cloudy but breezy and warm day. Then on Wednesday, the rain chances and the next threat of severe storms will move into Louisiana.

weather.gov/lch

The Storm Prediction Center outlook for Wednesday’s severe weather potential suggests that the northern and central sections of the state might be more at risk for stronger storms than the I-10 corridor might be.

READ MORE: Who Is Appearing at Patty in the Parc in Lafayette?

We will know more about that potential later this morning when the SPC updates its forecast. The outlook for the remainder of the week, including the Patty in the Parc Weekend event in Downtown Lafayette, looks to be spectacular.