A New Era of State Control Over New Orleans
Since taking office in January 2024, Governor Jeff Landry has made it clear that he intends to reshape Louisiana in his image. But perhaps no part of the state has felt the impact of his vision more acutely than New Orleans. Through legislation, executive orders, policing tactics, and public messaging, Landry has treated the city less like a partner in governance and more like a problem to be solved—or worse, a stage on which to project political dominance. His administration has prioritized spectacle over substance, power over partnership, and punitive action over community-driven solutions.
This is not merely a shift in policy; it’s a shift in philosophy. Landry’s Louisiana is one where civil liberties are narrowed, effectively losing control over their own streets, and where the state can override the priorities of local governments with little to no collaboration. In New Orleans, this has manifested in high-profile homeless sweeps, the militarization of public space, the suppression of immigrant access to services, and the criminalization of personal health choices. It has also resulted in sweeping changes to civil justice, environmental resilience, and reproductive autonomy, each of which strikes at the heart of New Orleans’ political and cultural identity.
Though framed as part of a broader “law and order” agenda, these actions reveal the erosion of New Orleans’ ability to define and defend its own values. Landry is not simply governing the state; he is rewriting the rules of who gets to govern; and New Orleans, with its progressive politics, racial diversity, and deep-rooted culture of resistance, has become a prime target.
The Warehouse, the Super Bowl, and the Spectacle of Control
The clearest early sign of how Governor Landry would wield his power over New Orleans came just before the city was set to host Super Bowl LIX. In October 2024 and again in January 2025, Landry declared a state of emergency and ordered the removal of homeless encampments near high-visibility areas like the Superdome and the French Quarter. More than one hundred unhoused people were forcibly relocated to a so-called “Transitional Center” in a warehouse on France Road in Gentilly under threat of arrest if they refused.
There was no public bid for the contract. Instead, the $17.5 million operation was handed to The Workforce Group, a subsidiary of a politically connected Lafayette-based construction firm with ties to GOP donors. The cost, nearly three times what the City of New Orleans and local providers had proposed for permanent housing programs, drew sharp criticism from housing advocates and councilmembers alike. Unity of Greater New Orleans had requested only $6–8 million to provide stable, long-term housing with wraparound services. But their offer, like that of other nonprofits with years of experience on the ground, was ignored in favor of a no-bid deal with a firm that had never operated a shelter before.
Conditions inside the warehouse were harsh. There was no heating system during the winter cold spell, and water reportedly leaked through the ceiling. Residents described being isolated from their case managers and stripped of their possessions. One man told The Guardian he was relocated without medication and spent the first nights freezing on a cot in a corner. There were no partitions, few support staff, and limited access to any services that could be reasonably described as “transitional.”
Over 90 days, 183 people passed through the center. According to state data, only 108 were transitioned into housing. With the operation costing $17.5 million, that amounts to over $160,000 per person re-housed. This represents an astronomical figure that local providers argued could have built actual homes instead of warehousing people for show. Meanwhile, advocates scrambled to find those who had scattered after the sweeps, some of whom were lost to follow-up entirely.
The move blindsided city officials. Councilmembers Lesli Harris and Helena Moreno both said the city had offered to collaborate with the state to expand shelter access and deploy social workers, but the proposals were brushed aside. There was no transparency about the budget or formal metrics for success. There was no inclusion of New Orleans-based providers who had built relationships with the unhoused population; and, when pressed for justification, Landry’s office pointed not to outcomes but to appearances. “We got people off the street,” the governor said in a press conference, framing the operation as a success in optics if not in substance.
This was simply political theater that is interested in exerting control, and not about improving lives by constructively addressing housing policy.
It also wasn’t the only performance unfolding in New Orleans. Following the January 1 truck attack that delayed the Sugar Bowl, Landry sent Louisiana State Police into the city in full force. Officers set up barricades, patrolled popular tourist areas, and instituted security checkpoints throughout the French Quarter. While framed as a public safety response, there was no clear exit strategy. Rather, there was just the visible assertion of control. The move left local authorities to work around state police. Residents reported being stopped without cause. Entire streets were turned into temporary checkpoints.
For many, especially unhoused individuals and Black residents in majority-Black neighborhoods near downtown, the message was clear that their presence was a problem to be managed. The state’s security surge was clearly aimed at proving who held authority in the city and not on a building trust through a spirit of collaboration. In one weekend, New Orleans felt less like a community preparing for celebration and more like a territory under surveillance.
What these actions demonstrated—through force, contract, and silence—was a new reality in Louisiana governance. Jeff Landry wasn’t just interested in supporting New Orleans; he was interested in subduing it. Landry had no interest in negotiating with City Hall or building on the knowledge of frontline providers. He governed instead by decree, deploying resources not based on need, but on visibility.
And for the most vulnerable residents of New Orleans, the cost of that visibility was extraordinarily high.
Criminalizing Care—From Immigrant Aid to Personal Autonomy
While the visible assertion of state power on the streets of New Orleans drew headlines, some of Governor Landry’s most consequential efforts to reshape the city have come through legislation designed to control who receives care—and under what conditions. Two of the most stark examples are Senate Bill 100 and Senate Bill 154: one targeting undocumented immigrants, the other banning kratom, a widely used herbal supplement. Both laws reflect Landry’s ideological project of criminalizing vulnerability and imposing state-mandated moral frameworks on local populations.
SB 100, signed into law in June 2025, requires all Louisiana state agencies to report the immigration status of individuals who receive public services. The bill was marketed as a measure to improve coordination and “uphold the rule of law,” but its real-world impact is far more insidious. In a state with limited access to health care, housing, and public benefits, SB 100 creates a chilling effect. For immigrants—documented or not—the risk of being flagged, tracked, or reported for seeking basic help becomes a barrier to survival.
Nowhere is that more acute than in New Orleans, a sanctuary-minded city with a large immigrant community and a long-standing network of mutual aid and service providers. Local nonprofits offering food assistance, housing referrals, or health care access have warned that SB 100 effectively forces them to choose between serving people or complying with state law. Already-overburdened shelters and clinics may find themselves having to turn people away. In public schools and hospitals, fear of identification could prevent immigrant families from enrolling their children or seeking emergency care. In practical terms, SB 100 doesn’t just create paperwork—it turns compassion into potential liability.
It also represents a fundamental clash between state and city values. New Orleans has long embraced a philosophy of inclusion, from its embrace of undocumented workers in the rebuilding after Katrina to its refusal to cooperate with ICE detainer requests under previous city administrations. With SB 100, Landry sends a clear message: the state’s vision of law enforcement and control takes precedence over the city’s ethic of care.
If SB 100 targets immigrants under the guise of legality, SB 154 extends the reach of criminalization into the realm of personal health. Passed during the same legislative session, SB 154 bans the sale and possession of kratom—a plant-based substance derived from the leaves of a Southeast Asian tree and used by tens of thousands of Louisianans to manage chronic pain, anxiety, and opioid withdrawal.
For years, kratom existed in a legal gray area in Louisiana. While banned in some parishes, it remained legal in Orleans Parish and widely available at local herb shops, cafés, and wellness spaces. Its users span all demographics, but many are low-income residents managing pain without access to traditional health care or trying to avoid relapse into opioid use. For them, kratom offered autonomy, relief, and dignity outside the grasp of both the pharmaceutical industry and the carceral system.
That autonomy is now gone. As of August 1, 2025, anyone found possessing kratom in Louisiana could face felony charges under the state’s controlled substances law. Landry supported the bill despite vocal opposition from health professionals, harm reduction advocates, and civil liberties groups. In fact, opponents argued for regulation and purity standards, not prohibition. But the legislature, backed by law enforcement and pharmaceutical industry allies, framed the substance as a public threat without citing clear evidence that kratom itself was causing widespread harm. The Louisiana Department of Health listed only a handful of deaths involving kratom, nearly all in combination with other drugs.
The political calculation was clear that banning kratom made for good optics in a conservative “tough on drugs” framework, even if the real-life consequences were devastating for people trying to survive without opioids, without insurance, and often without reliable access to health care. In New Orleans, where attitudes toward harm reduction have long been more progressive than in the rest of the state, the ban felt like an ideological crackdown, and one that erased a culture of care and replaced it with punishment.
Together, SB 100 and SB 154 illustrate Landry’s broader strategy, which included legislating morality, controlling access to care, and forcing local governments to enforce laws that directly contradict their values. Whether it’s undocumented parents seeking services for their children or chronically ill residents buying kratom tea to manage pain, Landry has criminalized their existence. In New Orleans—a city shaped by migration, mutual aid, and bodily autonomy—that criminalization strikes at identity.
Rebuilding the Cage—Landry’s Rollback of Criminal Justice Reform
For a brief moment in the late 2010s, Louisiana appeared to be turning a corner on mass incarceration. Bipartisan criminal justice reforms signed by Governor John Bel Edwards in 2017 had begun to reduce the state’s world-leading incarceration rate. Reentry programs were expanded, parole eligibility was broadened, and sentences were recalibrated to reduce nonviolent prison populations. It was far from perfect, but it was progress. That progress is now under siege.
Governor Jeff Landry has made it clear that criminal justice reform, especially anything resembling decarceration, has no place in his administration. In 2025, he signed a package of bills that dismantles nearly every pillar of the previous reform era. The administration has significantly reduced good behavior credits and abolished parole for most offenses. Mandatory minimums have been expanded. Prosecutorial discretion has been curbed. The message is unambiguous: longer sentences, fewer chances for release, and more people behind bars.
Nowhere will this rollback be felt more than in New Orleans. The city has been home to some of the most ambitious criminal justice reforms in the state: shrinking the jail population from over 6,000 pre-Katrina to under 1,000 today, investing in diversion courts, and working—albeit slowly—toward compliance with a longstanding federal consent decree at the Orleans Parish jail. But Landry’s laws move in the opposite direction. They threaten to flood the jail with more pretrial detainees, many of them unable to afford bond or navigate complex court schedules. They risk undoing local progress in reducing recidivism by denying pathways for early release and rehabilitation.
Landry’s punitive philosophy was further crystallized in May 2025, when eight inmates escaped from the Orleans Justice Center. Rather than engaging with the longstanding issues underlying the jailbreak—chronic understaffing, crumbling infrastructure, and inconsistent oversight—Landry used the incident to launch a rhetorical attack on local leadership. He blamed the escape on “progressive promises” and “soft-on-crime policies,” and announced a full state-led audit of the jail, even though his own administration had reduced support for correctional oversight statewide.
The jailbreak became the political cover Landry needed to double down. In the days following the incident, he pushed for and signed emergency amendments allowing for longer detention of arrestees without formal charges, expanded definitions of “violent” offenses under sentencing law, and additional funding for private prison contracts under the guise of “bed shortages.” These laws don’t just affect people who have committed crimes—they impact anyone who comes into contact with the system, whether guilty or not. And in New Orleans, a city where Black residents are overpoliced and overcharged, the weight of these changes falls hardest on communities already living with generational trauma from state violence.
What’s more, Landry’s rollback of reforms happens alongside his simultaneous attacks on local diversion efforts. Programs like LEAD (Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion), which redirect people accused of low-level offenses into treatment or housing programs rather than jail, now operate in legal uncertainty, as the state has declined to fund or support any initiatives that do not conform to its “punishment-first” approach.
New Orleans is a city that knows incarceration intimately. It has seen children grow up visiting their fathers in Angola, only to land there themselves. It has seen the jailhouse become a mental health facility, a substance abuse detox site, and a waiting room for people too poor to post bond. The last decade has seen modest but meaningful attempts to reverse that legacy. Landry is determined to reverse those reversals.
This isn’t about keeping people safe. It’s about keeping them in cages. The city of New Orleans is already forced to house more inmates than its staff can manage, and scrambling to comply with federal mandates. The city is being pushed to the brink by a state government that governs through fear rather than care.
Rewriting the Rules of Accountability—From Insurance to Abortion Lawsuits
As Governor Landry expands the carceral state and criminalizes care, he’s also reshaping how everyday people access justice—or, more precisely, who gets to access it at all. In the 2025 legislative session, Landry signed a series of bills that restructured Louisiana’s civil legal system, tilting the scales in favor of insurers, powerful interests, and ideologically aligned activists, while narrowing the ability of ordinary people to seek redress or protection. In New Orleans, where poverty, car dependency, and reproductive health disparities intersect with racial and gender injustice, these changes are deeply personal.
Landry’s civil justice agenda began with a sweeping tort reform package marketed as a fix for Louisiana’s spiraling insurance crisis. But many of the laws he signed do far more to shield insurers and punish the poor than to reduce premiums. HB 434, for instance, dramatically raises the threshold for uninsured drivers to recover damages in civil court. Prior to 2025, an uninsured driver could still seek compensation for injuries in cases involving bodily harm up to $15,000. Under the new law, that floor jumps to $100,000 for bodily injury and $100,000 for property damage. That change effectively bars the working poor, many of whom live paycheck to paycheck and cannot afford Louisiana’s nation-high auto premiums, from seeking justice even when they are victims.
Another law, HB 450, eliminated the so-called Housley presumption. For decades, Louisiana law allowed injured accident victims to presume their injuries were caused by the crash itself unless the defense could prove otherwise. This helped streamline claims and shield low-income people from burdensome medical testimony requirements. With the presumption gone, the burden now falls squarely on the injured party, who must not only survive the crash but assemble the evidence to prove that it caused their injuries. For residents of New Orleans East, the Lower Ninth Ward, and other underserved areas, where access to healthcare, legal counsel, and reliable transportation is limited, the barrier to justice just got a lot higher.
The same legislative session brought another blow to transparency. In June, Landry signed an ethics overhaul that severely curtailed the investigative power of the Louisiana Board of Ethics. The new law shortens the time window for filing complaints, restricts the board’s authority to initiate investigations, and allows targets of complaints more leeway to delay or obstruct proceedings. These changes come as the state increases no-bid contracting, like the $17.5 million transitional shelter awarded to a politically connected firm without oversight. For a city with a long history of political corruption and cronyism, the loss of ethics enforcement is not just troubling. It’s a green light for unchecked power.
But the most chilling piece of legislation to come from the 2025 session is House Bill 575, a law that allows any private citizen in Louisiana to file a civil lawsuit against someone who “aids or abets” another person in obtaining an abortion even if the abortion occurs in another state. HB 575 is modeled after Texas’ infamous SB 8, and like its predecessor, it uses civil courts to enforce what criminal law cannot. The law offers a $10,000 minimum reward for a successful suit, effectively creating a bounty system that empowers vigilantes to surveil, report, and sue their neighbors.
In New Orleans, the consequences of HB 575 are especially severe. The city has been a last stronghold of reproductive justice in a state with a near-total abortion ban. It is home to abortion funds, transit support networks, telehealth clinics, and informal aid groups that help residents—often low-income women of color—access care across state lines. HB 575 turns every one of those volunteers into a potential defendant. If a New Orleanian buys a bus ticket for someone to travel to New Mexico for a legal abortion, they can now be sued by a stranger in Lafayette. If a clinic worker answers a phone call providing information, they may face legal jeopardy. The chilling effect is immediate and far-reaching.
This law also targets community solidarity in addition to abortion, creating a legal environment where helping someone in need is no longer an act of compassion, but rather, a civil liability. For New Orleans, a city whose survival has always depended on collective care, HB 575 is a cultural assault.
From traffic crashes to reproductive care, and from ethics enforcement to vigilante lawsuits, Landry’s legislation redraws the boundaries of who gets access to justice. In every case, those most affected continue to be the poor, the undocumented, the overpoliced, and the people who still believe that care—legal, medical, or otherwise—is a human right, and not a political favor.
Undermining Climate Resilience—The Sediment Diversion Pause and the Politics of Delay
As the climate crisis accelerates and sea levels continue to rise, Louisiana stands at the front lines of a slow-moving disaster. No place in the state is more exposed than New Orleans—a city shaped by water, surrounded by disappearing wetlands, and increasingly vulnerable to storm surge and subsidence. For decades, planners, scientists, and environmental justice advocates have pushed for large-scale coastal restoration projects to protect the city’s future. The centerpiece of that effort was the Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion, a $2.9 billion project designed to rebuild eroded marshland by diverting sediment from the Mississippi River into Barataria Bay. The project, over a decade in the making, had already received more than $573 million in funding and had cleared both state and federal permitting hurdles. But in June 2025, Governor Jeff Landry abruptly halted it.
The stated reason was the revelation of a previously unreleased 2022 impact study suggesting the project might produce less land than initially promised—around seven square miles rather than 21. But critics argue the pause had little to do with science and everything to do with politics. Landry accused the previous administration of suppressing the report, but coastal scientists, including those with the Water Institute of the Gulf, said the findings had long been part of internal modeling reviews and did not constitute new information. Environmental groups warned that the delay could cost the state not only time but federal trust and funding. In July, the Army Corps of Engineers announced it would suspend the project’s permit while it reviewed Landry’s claims, effectively halting construction for the foreseeable future.
The timing of Landry’s decision was suspect. It came after months of pressure from coastal fishing lobbies and oil-aligned legislators, many of whom oppose diversions out of fear they will disrupt fisheries or restrict industrial access to river channels. Rather than work to mitigate those concerns or invest in compromise, Landry opted for delay—at the cost of one of the most ambitious climate adaptation projects in the country.
For New Orleans, the consequences are existential. Communities in New Orleans East, Gentilly, and the Lower Ninth Ward remain chronically exposed to flooding and storm surge. These areas are disproportionately home to Black and Vietnamese residents, many of whom have already endured multiple displacement events—from Katrina to Ida to the COVID-era housing crisis. The Mid-Barataria project was not a perfect solution, but it was a crucial step toward buffering the region from the next climate catastrophe. With the project paused, the marshland continues to disappear at a rate of a football field every 100 minutes, weakening the natural barrier between the Gulf of Mexico and New Orleans’ levees.
Worse still, Landry has offered no alternative vision, no replacement plan, no fast-tracked climate mitigation investment, and no strategy to bolster green infrastructure in urban areas. The governor’s response to a generational climate threat is inertia, cloaked in skepticism. In a state where storms routinely displace thousands and insurance premiums have soared to crisis levels, this isn’t just environmental mismanagement, and moreover, neglect.
Environmental justice advocates have long warned that climate adaptation must include the voices and needs of frontline communities. In New Orleans, that means investing not just in diversion projects, but in stormwater management, green space, and equitable infrastructure. It means protecting renters from floodplain displacement and ensuring that energy resilience doesn’t stop at the Garden District. Landry’s decision to halt Mid-Barataria undermines those goals and silences those voices.
It also reinforces a disturbing trend in his administration that when faced with complex, long-term challenges—homelessness, incarceration, environmental collapse—Landry defaults to delay, deflection, and blame. His approach to coastal protection mirrors his approach to social protection, which involves centralized control, minimal transparency, and maximum political posturing.
If the last two decades have taught New Orleans anything, it is that delay kills. The city cannot afford to wait for Baton Rouge to rediscover its moral compass. The marshes won’t wait. The storms won’t wait. And the people living behind those disappearing wetlands certainly shouldn’t have to.
The Price of Submission
What Governor Jeff Landry has done in just eighteen months is not governance in any conventional sense. It is a hostile redesign of how power works in Louisiana, including who gets to wield it, who gets to challenge it, and who must live under its weight. Nowhere has this been felt more acutely than in New Orleans, where Landry’s policies have turned the city into a proving ground for an aggressive conservative realignment. This is not about one bill, one jail, one warehouse, or one project. It is about a pattern of executive overreach that treats New Orleans less as a community of people and more as a problem to be solved with force, surveillance, silence, and punishment.
Landry has overridden local housing plans with military-style sweeps, and he has imposed police saturation and surveillance without community consent. The governor has effectively criminalized immigrant access to basic services and turned volunteers who support reproductive choice into targets for lawsuits. He has made it harder for people to sue after car accidents, harder for inmates to earn early release, harder for communities to protect their coastlines, and harder for public officials to be held accountable. He has done all this under the banner of law and order, but what he is really building is a state that governs by coercion and spectacle, rather than by justice or consent.
In New Orleans, the toll of this governance is heavier because the city stands for something deeper than tourism or tradition. It stands for cultural survival, collective care, resistance, and reinvention, and a belief that people—not power brokers—should shape their own future. That belief is now under direct attack. Whether in the form of kratom bans, abortion bounty laws, anti-immigrant surveillance, or the slow strangling of climate protection, Landry’s vision leaves little room for dissent, diversity, or dignity.
But New Orleans has never accepted subjugation quietly. It has resisted empire, segregation, police violence, and corporate exploitation. It has birthed second lines and sit-ins, freedom schools and food banks, jazz and justice. What’s happening now—this shrinking of local authority, this forced submission to a state vision that does not reflect the will of the people—is not inevitable. It can be challenged. It must be.
The stakes are not just symbolic. They are material, environmental, and human; and, they are about who lives and who dies, who is sheltered and who is swept, who is heard, and who is silenced. The price of submission is too high, and New Orleans has paid it too many times before.
The question now is whether we will accept another chapter in that story, or whether we will write a different one.
