In 2022, Tulane University professor Marilyn Miller participated in a ceremony for a traveling exhibit called “Ireichō” — the first-ever effort to document every person of Japanese descent sent to live in concentration camps around the country under orders from the federal government during World War II.
For the ceremony, Miller collected soil on a plot of land in Algiers scattered with old, fenced-off brick buildings along the Mississippi River Levee. During World War II, that plot had been the location of an “enemy alien” internment site called Camp Algiers. Although only a small number of Japanese descendants were detained there, the soil Miller gathered was important for the ceremony to feel complete.
“This little bit of soil was forgotten for the most part, and yet it became part of this monumental effort,” Miller said in an interview with Verite News last month. “And that was only the Japanese piece.”
Miller’s book, “Port of No Return: Enemy Alien Internment in World War II New Orleans,” documents this “forgotten” piece of New Orleans history about the Algiers facility that functioned as a World War II internment camp for non-U.S. citizens – mostly Europeans who had been living in Latin America – held on suspicion of being pro-Nazi, pro-facist or anti-American, based on overblown fears by the U.S. government of Nazi and Fascist strongholds in Central and South America.
In recent decades, the former federal facility has kept a low profile, with roughly one-third of the property operating as a station for U.S. Customs and Border Protection until 2019. The buildings on the site are currently vacant. And many — including the former hospital that housed internees — have been torn down and the property has been split into multiple parcels of land.
Now two of those parcels are getting some extra attention from new owners who plan to create new uses for the buildings on this historic site.
On one end of the original 10-acre site, Lindsay and Joel Snodgrass, owners of a parcel that runs along Patterson Drive directly across from the levee, have submitted plans to the city of New Orleans to restore the facility’s seven remaining brick buildings — which include former administrative offices and government workers’ quarters — and use it as a wedding and retreat venue and event space with the capacity for overnight lodging. Ownership of the property is listed under the name, Laizzes Fair Manor, LLC.
On the other end — across from a city-owned park made up of two parcels of land from the former quarantine station — the lone remaining two story medical officer’s home, which was restored in 2018, sits at the center of a cul de sac surrounded by trees.
In late 2024, restauranteur and construction business owner Cassi Dymond, along with acclaimed chef and owner of the restaurant Mosquito Supper Club and culinary book author Melissa Martin, acquired the house — which had also been owned for a time by the Orleans Parish School Board, and most recently was maintained as a private residence — with intentions of creating a restaurant capable of seating 35 guests and an event space on the property, called Saint Claire.
The Snodgrasses, Dymond and Martin have declined to speak with Verite News on the record, as they say it would be premature to comment given the early stages that their projects are in. The Snodgrasses have informed neighbors of the property that they aim to “keep the historical integrity of the property.”
The creation of Camp Algiers
After thinking about this piece of land for several years, Miller said she hopes the new plans “can also be presented to the public in an educational way, where they can’t keep looking past this history.”
That history of the property can be traced back to the Prohibition Era of the 1920s, when, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the property was used by border patrol officers to intercept smugglers carrying alcohol and human cargo from the Caribbean up the Mississippi River by boat.
Designed in the colonial-revival and neo-classical style of architect Louis A. Simon, and built as a quarantine station in 1931 – the original property featured 18 buildings, most of which were made of brick, including a hospital, attendants quarters, administrative offices, and five two-story medical officers’ residences with wooden facades that sat along the curves of a manicured cul de sac.
When the quarantine station was officially established in 1934 — seven years before the U.S. entered World War II — Miller wrote, correspondence from immigration officials that year noted that the quarantine station was “ideal as a detention headquarters if modernized.”
While the largest group of people interned by the U.S. government during World War II were people of Japanese descent — most of whom were U.S. citizens — other groups, including non-U.S. citizens from Germany, Austria and Italy, were also targeted for internment.
The federal government worked with officials in partner Central and South American countries, including Panama, Ecuador and Peru, who created lists of suspected “U.S. enemies,” who had relocated to the Western hemisphere. Many were Jews who had fled Nazi-Germany and resettled in Latin America, only to be then rounded up by the governments that had taken them in.
“It started with U.S. overreach in Latin America,” Miller told Verite.
The New Orleans station, called Camp Algiers during the war, began to operate as part of the “Enemy Alien Control Program” in December 1941, functioning in large part as a transfer station for immigrants who had been deported to the U.S. from these partner countries to the South.
Miller said the suspects were often targeted because of business holdings or property they had acquired, which were often taken from them and redistributed after their arrests.
The “Enemy Alien Control Program” briefly operated inside the Latin American countries that partnered with the U.S., but citing corruption, the U.S. quickly began transferring detainees to American soil.
“I don’t think you can blame corruption on a program that you yourself implemented,” Miller said.
In New Orleans, and other ports, while still on board the transporting vessels, detainees were stripped of their passports and later charged with illegal entry into the U.S., so that they would be eligible for deportation once the war was over.
“They themselves described their experience as being kidnapped,” Miller said.
From Algiers, the majority of them went on to larger and more well known camps in other states including Texas, Oklahoma and Tennessee.
Camp Algiers later gained the name “camp of the innocent” as it became home to dozens of Jews and other anti-Nazis, transferred there after they experienced harassment from pro-Nazi-internees in other camps — including receiving insults and witnessing fellow internees parade through the camps with Nazi flags.
“Beginning in 1943, all Jewish internees and many anti-Nazis who feared violence – or had already suffered it – at the hands of detainees in other camps were transferred to Camp Algiers for their protection,” Miller wrote in “Port of No Return.”
By creating a camp for “innocents,” Miller noted, the U.S. government “acknowledged the faulty nature of blanket characterizations of national groups such as ‘Germans’ or ‘Japanese.’”
She also noted that officials managing the site said internees were free to do as they pleased. They had opportunities to travel into the city for religious services, children attended New Orleans schools and the local council of Jewish Women organized lessons in various subjects including English and “Americanization.”
The internment camp closes
In 1943, the U.S. government began releasing many of the detainees who argued against their internment on the basis that they were Jewish or anti-Nazi. According to a news report from the “New Orleans Item” that Miller cited in her book, 53 Jewish detainees were released from Camp Algiers under a program called “internment at large.” Similar to modern immigration parole, it allowed the internees to live in communities throughout the United States, but under some form of surveillance or restriction of movement.
Eventually, the camp’s reputation of being for “the innocent” was sullied when a former advisor to Adolf Hitler, Kurt Ludecke, and other pro-Nazi internees were transferred to the Algiers station. Ludecke would briefly be voted as a leader among the internees by other pro-Nazi detainees.
The acting Swiss consul in New Orleans noted a “kind of mental torture” that the small remaining group of Jewish detainees experienced because of the Nazi presence at the camp, Miller wrote.
In 1946, when it came time to close the camps, the U.S. government attempted to return non-citizen internees to their birth countries. Many of them protested, wishing to be transferred to the Latin American countries where they were taken, where they often found they had nothing to return to.
The facility was returned to the federal Public Health Services when the war was over. According to a 2019 application to the National Park Service to designate the property now owned by the Snodgrasses as a historic site, the City of New Orleans acquired the two parcels in the middle of the property in the 1970s.
The property where the Snodgrasses are planning their event venue was used by Customs and Border Protection for patrol officers looking to intercept vessels heading up the Mississippi until 2018, and was not open to the public.
In an email submitted to City Planning Commission staff in November 2024, Lindsay Snodgrass expressed her and her husband’s wish to “help build up Algiers and bring vitality and community back to this neighborhood.”
“My husband and I are the only investors,” she said. “This is our dream project and long-term retirement plan.”
A letter to neighbors of the property from Lindsay Snodgrass, ahead of an October community meeting about the larger project, shared the couple’s intentions to “keep the historical integrity of the property and restore it to a beautiful functioning site again.”
Responses from community members that the Snodgrasses submitted to the City Planning Commission show strong support for the owners’ plans to maintain historic elements of the buildings.
The property was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2019. The Snodgrasses are eligible for federal and state tax credits if they complete their renovations in adherence with certain preservation guidelines.
“Perhaps this designation will serve as a prompt to preserve not only the buildings themselves,” Miller wrote at the end of the chapter of her book titled, New Orleans’s (Mostly) Secret Internment History, “but also the little known history they contain.”
Correction: An earlier version of this story said that the Snodgrasses received historic tax credits. They have not received the credits, but are eligible to receive them upon completion of their renovations to the property they own.
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