- ICE arrested two drivers on Wednesday near a Meta construction project in Louisiana, officials said.
- The individuals were detained during a traffic stop inspection of vehicles heading to the site.
- “ICE did not enter the Meta site at any time,” the local sheriff’s office said.
Meta’s new mega data center project had a brush with immigration authorities.
The Sheriff’s Office in Louisiana’s Richland Parish, where the massive Hyperion Data Center is under construction, said Wednesday that US Immigration and Customs Enforcement detained two dump truck drivers traveling to the site during a traffic stop inspection.
“During those stops, two drivers were arrested by ICE due to their immigration status,” the office said. The drivers were from Guatemala and Honduras.
“ICE did not enter the Meta site at any time,” the office said.
In a statement to Business Insider late Thursday, the Department of Homeland Security said that ICE did not target a Meta data center in Louisiana.
The DHS spokesperson said that the ICE agents had carried out a “targeted operation” to arrest the truck driver from Honduras, and had encountered another driver from Guatemala. It said both were arrested and are in ICE custody.
Meta declined to comment to Business Insider.
The Meta project is the largest of several multi-gigawatt data centers that CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said will come online as the company races to catch up on AI computing capacity.
Wednesday’s arrests crystallize an issue that companies have increasingly had to grapple with over the past year: how to prepare workers for an ICE encounter, whether on or off company property.
The action also follows a recent surge of ICE activity in cities and towns across the US, which has met some resistance in Democratic-led states.
Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry has been a prominent supporter of President Donald Trump’s immigration policies. The state is receiving nearly $1 million a month to house detainees at its Angola prison, Axios reported, citing public records.
January 15, 11.25 p.m. E.T. — This story was updated to include comments from a DHS spokesperson.
