David J. Phillip/AP
Residents in New Orleans, Louisiana, wait on a rooftop on September 1, 2005, for rescue from floodwaters following the landfall of Hurricane Katrina. They have written “HELP” in large letters on the roof and are waving flags for visibility.
It has been twenty years, as I write this, since Hurricane Katrina breached the levees that protect New Orleans from floodwaters. Twenty years since nearly 1,400 people died, and tens of thousands more were displaced, many never to return. Twenty years since New Orleans was remade. Twenty years since we first, perhaps, began to see what climate change can and will do.
The reminders are everywhere in the city, if you know where to look. I have been walking by them these past three years since returning here. Some are preserved intentionally, others were simply never rebuilt. They are reminders that the government—which, in 2005, so many of us still thought existed to provide a safety net, if a frayed one—failed Louisiana at every level.
If there were any lessons learned nationally from Katrina, the predominant one seems to have been that we’re all on our own, and it’s everyone for themselves. The Trump Administration is the peak of this ideology, so far, as it begins dismantling the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), along with much of the rest of the federal government.
The organized abandonment, in geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s term, that Katrina showcased has only accelerated in the intervening decades. Brief moments of respite—such as federal programs during the COVID-19 pandemic—have been followed by even more rapid destruction.
Just a few days before the twentieth anniversary of Katrina’s landfall on August 29, 2005, FEMA employees sent a “Katrina declaration” to members of Congress to “sound the alarm” that the agency under Trump is undoing post-Katrina reforms intended to prevent such catastrophic failures from ever recurring. In the letter, the federal workers note that one third of the agency’s full-time staff have departed so far this year. As federal worker Colin Smalley—with the Army Corps of Engineers, another critical agency in disaster prevention—told me earlier this year, the administration is “trying to take a torch to the entire concept that we should care about each other as humans.”
You can see all of the country’s ills on display in Louisiana today, twenty years on. The obvious ones include beefed-up policing and homeless sweeps, statewide bans on abortion and discussions of queer and transgender identities in schools, and ongoing structural racism that shaped the Katrina response and who was able to return and rebuild.
Both the city of New Orleans and Louisiana more broadly are still divided into criminalized poverty and absurd wealth, and while carnival season has returned to briefly blur those lines, these realities continue to shape lives. When it comes to the twinned American pathologies of gun violence and mass incarceration, Louisiana is near the top of the list. For a while, the state was the prison capital of the world, its incarceration rate three times higher than Iran’s and ten times that of Germany.
Republican Governor Jeff Landry, a former police officer, has made recent moves to ratchet that rate up again. And should I mention the indictment of New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell for corruption involving her police officer bodyguard turned boyfriend? I have long said that New Orleans is both the most and the least American of U.S. cities: Its unique culture of jazz and collective joy sets it apart, even as it struggles with all of the disastrous patterns of racial capitalism that have made this country what it is.
The decision—abetted by Congress—to turn the resources of the federal government largely to immigration policing is also on display in Louisiana. As I write this, Abner Uriel Gómez Velásquez and Ever Eliseo Velásquez Fuentes—just two of the thousands of people who came here in the aftermath of Katrina to gut sodden buildings and reconstruct the city—languish in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention, after having been arrested while on a construction job site near Lafayette. Other worksite raids scooped up post-Katrina laborers working on a marquee “green infrastructure” project in New Orleans’s Gentilly neighborhood. At least one, Miguel Vindel, had led organizing efforts among workers with the Congress of Day Laborers. He was deported to El Salvador following his arrest in May.
Those workers, dubbed “second responders” in a 2017 by researcher Nik Theodore and the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, are welcomed at first; President George W. Bush suspended rules requiring employers to check workers’ immigration status in the wake of Katrina, and honoring the immigrant workers who did recovery labor stands in Crescent Park along the Mississippi riverfront. But after a while, once the need is less dire, Mary Yanik, co-director of the Immigrant Rights Clinic at Tulane University Law School in New Orleans, told me, “then you do see waves of enforcement, or the story a lot of the worker centers campaigns showed that the moment that workers start to assert their rights, all of a sudden ICE is called.”
The Brennan Center for Justice argues that Trump’s budget, with its jaw-dropping $170 billion earmarked over four years for border and interior enforcement, will create a “deportation-industrial complex,” appropriating “huge sums for deportations while neglecting processes that are needed for a fair and workable immigration system.” The private interests who stand to benefit from all that money, the center warns, create “strong economic and political interests that will make the new apparatus very difficult to dismantle.”
This, of course, echoes the existing prison-industrial complex, and as New Orleans-based geographer Lydia Pelot-Hobbs has highlighted, the immigration detention complex is also deeply rooted in Louisiana—Mahmoud Khalil and other high-profile detainees were sent to Jena, hundreds of miles from where they were arrested, in an intensification of the already existing practice of shipping prisoners and detainees away from their homes and support systems. Louisiana experienced a boom in detention center construction in the 1980s, intertwined with the expansion of jails as holding facilities and Cold War military infrastructure, Pelot-Hobbs noted. Those centers have long been tied to pathways of local and national political and economic power. The new funding will accelerate an existing system of death- and misery-making.
Mass incarceration in Louisiana is also twinned with another disastrous industry: oil and gas. As Pelot-Hobbs wrote in her book Prison Capital, oil money helped build Louisiana’s prisons, and then the oil crash led to austerity measures—where once again, the only spending seemed to be on law enforcement. Governor Landry’s priorities mirror those of the 1980s crisis, Pelot-Hobbs wrote in Truthout in 2023: deregulate oil and gas while ratcheting up policing.
“Policymakers’ development of the Louisiana political economy on the volatile industries of oil and gas has ensured cyclical economic crises that have normalized precarity and provided cover for politicians who claim that the only legitimate sectors to invest in are prisons and police,” she wrote. “All the while, the extraction and refinement of oil and gas destroy wetlands and increase carbon emissions—together exacerbating Louisiana’s vulnerability to climate change.”
As if the oil industry weren’t enough of a disaster, Louisiana is now opening up shop to massive data centers, which suck energy while creating little in the way of economic security. In rural northeastern Louisiana, Meta—the parent company of Facebook and Instagram—is building its biggest data center yet for so-called artificial intelligence (AI), which will be powered by three new gas-fueled electric power plants. The center will cost $10 billion, and will use roughly three times the amount of electricity that the city of New Orleans uses in a year, according to The Times-Picayune.
Politicians justify the data centers, like the oil and gas infrastructure before them, as economic development. But leaving aside the long-term goal of so-called AI to replace workers, the centers offer very little to long-term residents besides more destruction. “Man camps” are already springing up in Richland Parish, housing temporary workers while locals watch. The project is slated to take up 2,250 acres, its buildings “totaling four million square feet—about the equivalent of seventy football fields—each lined with racks of powerful computers.” But all of that space will only create “up to 500” permanent jobs once the construction is done—about one job per 8,000 square feet. (The site was once slated for an auto plant that was never built.)
Advocates, meanwhile, are worried about the water supply, and whether water from their aquifer will be used to cool computers rather than sustain humans. At the same time, the construction jobs seem to be going to out-of-towners, with the trickle-down effect so far apparently limited to increased traffic at the area’s few food shops. A local resident told The Times-Picayune, “The kind of jobs they’re creating won’t help the folks who live out here.”
Meta isn’t even the only company building big data centers in Louisiana. In West Feliciana Parish, another company is building a center for “an undisclosed tenant,” which, according to reporting in The Advocate, “will create thousands of construction jobs and more than fifty technician and maintenance jobs.” Hut 8, the company doing the construction, operates Bitcoin mining facilities and data centers around the United States and Canada. “It could be the next oil boom if we play our cards right,” Parish President Kenny Havard told reporters.
Havard’s goal is to “raise the parish’s quality of life, while adding walking paths and green spaces.” But how? The parish will get property taxes from the data center, but a 2024 state law exempts data centers from sales tax on the equipment they need to build and operate the center—the computers, in other words. The law was pushed through because, according to Secretary of Louisiana Economic Development Susan Bourgeois, Meta insisted on a tax exemption or rebate in order to build its massive center.
Meanwhile, New Orleans has struggled to power its drainage system, which pumps out water during storms. The city is shaped like a bowl; once water gets in, it doesn’t simply flow back out again on its own. Instead, it must be removed, and pumping problems are common. As of August 20, the new power complex, slated to replace “old, unreliable power sources with modern electricity” two years ago, had been delayed yet again, and as the Katrina anniversary reminds us, hurricane season has already begun.
Money for jails and power for data centers; no money and no power for the people. It’s the Louisiana story, but it’s also the United States story, and the story of late capitalism. The only sources of profit seem to be facilities of fixed capital that require very little human labor, and the only sources of public-sector work are in sweeping other people up and locking them away.
And yet, I do not want to leave you with a purely grim picture of Louisiana, and particularly of New Orleans. It is a city that people fought to return to, fought to rebuild, and continue to fight for. Even remote Jena, as Pelot-Hobbs noted, was “the site of the largest protest against anti-Black racism in the first decade of the twenty-first century,” when organizers fought the criminalization of the so-called Jena Six.
Louisianans anchored the fight to free Mahmoud Khalil and demanded the closure of detention facilities. They have battled jail construction and built encampments to demand a free Palestine. Nurses at University Medical Center—which replaced Charity Hospital after it was destroyed by the storm—have unionized and struck for better conditions for their patients and themselves. Residents are organizing to oppose construction of the data center, looking north to Memphis at the conditions faced by residents there after Elon Musk set up temporary gas turbines to power his “supercomputer” in pursuit of yet more nebulous gains from AI.
Katrina, after all, showed us how little the state and capital cared for the lives of people, particularly if those people are poor and Black. And the battle in Memphis for breathable air and drinkable water reminds us yet again that the storms that climate change brings may not discriminate, but the state and capital sure will, and they will locate their pollutants and prisons in the places where they think they will face the least resistance, and where they believe the people have the least power to make their resistance matter.
But Katrina also showed us that most people do not want to live in a country or a state or a world where people are simply abandoned to the waters and winds. We do not know yet what it will take to bring that world about, but the people of Louisiana have a lot to teach the rest of the world about what it means to survive.