Voters in Social Circle, Ga., overwhelmingly backed President Trump in 2024. But when the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) purchased a 1 million-square-foot warehouse in the tiny city to convert it into a mega detention center for immigrants, residents and local officials pushed back hard.
In February, the city notified Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) that it had shut off water and sewage services to the property until the agency explained how it could operate “without exceeding our limited infrastructure capacity.”
“We’re against it,” Eric Taylor, the Social Circle city manager, told The Hill. “Having something come in like this is just really a different dynamic than what this particular community is about.”
Social Circle, with a population of about 5,500, is by no means an exception; it is one of two communities in Georgia that illustrate a national trend. As the DHS has embarked on a $38.3 billion plan to boost detention capacity by 92,600 beds, communities that back the president’s agenda have said no to housing immigrants in their backyard.
New Jersey, alongside the GOP-leaning township of Roxbury, sued the DHS and ICE in March over a purchased warehouse. Residents of Surprise, Ariz., protested against a 1,500+ bed facility, which the DHS and ICE reduced to 500+ beds last month amid the uproar.
In February, Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) spoke out against a warehouse conversion plan in Byhalia, Miss. Separately, the Republican executive of Orange County, N.Y., told a January board meeting that “an ICE facility will create chaos and will tax our emergency management and first responders.”
“Just not in their backyard. They’re fine with it somewhere else, they just don’t want it back here,” Social Circle Council member Tyson Jackson said of the opposition in his community — a sentiment apparently shared in many other reliable red districts.
According to a document released by ICE in February, the agency is seeking to stand up eight large-scale detention facilities that each could hold 7,000 to 10,000 detainees for periods averaging less than 60 days, along with 16 smaller regional processing centers to hold up to 1,500 detainees for three to seven days.
The department has purchased warehouses in Arizona, Georgia, Maryland, Michigan, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Texas and Utah.
B.R. White, the city manager of Oakwood, Ga., where the DHS purchased a warehouse for a processing center, said the local reaction has been tilted heavily in one direction.
“There’s a large section of the population that’s shown up at several council meetings that are in opposition and then there was a small group of four [that] showed up at one meeting that were in favor of the detention facility,” he told The Hill.
White said federal agencies have made no effort to start a dialogue with Oakwood officials about its plans. He said the DHS and ICE are signaling that “we’re going to do this and to hell with you people.”
The city council passed a resolution in March barring the DHS and ICE from moving forward on the purchased property “until full infrastructure, environmental and economic impact studies are complete” and until the DHS and ICE “thoroughly complete responses” to the Freedom of Information Act request the city council filed in March.
White said the city council sent the resolution to the DHS and ICE, but never heard back.
In a February statement responding to the pushback, a DHS spokesperson said the new facilities “will not be warehouses — they will be very well-structured detention facilities meeting our regular detention standards. Every day, DHS is conducting law enforcement activities across the country to keep Americans safe.”
The DHS appears to be signalling a reset after the new Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin was sworn in last month to replace former Secretary Kristi Noem, who was fired by Trump.
The agency announced it is pausing new purchases for detention facilities and reviewing contracts signed under Noem.
“As with any transition, we are reviewing agency policies and proposals,” A DHS spokesperson told The Hill in an emailed statement.
The DHS spokesperson noted Mullin’s comment during his confirmation hearing, in which he said, “we want to work with community leaders. We want to be good partners.”
White said he believes the DHS will eventually move forward with its initial plan for the Oakwood warehouse, adding he is “just working with the assumption that sometime they’re going to lift the pause.”
He said about a more collaborative approach from the department, that “past behavior is an indication of future performance.”
“We don’t know what to believe at this moment,” he added.
Officials in both Social Circle and Oakwood said the only information they got on ICE’s plans came from public records about the sale.
“We had no idea this was coming,” Traysa Price, the mayor pro tempore of Social Circle, told The Hill last week.
“Of yet, we still don’t know. We don’t know the plan. I don’t know if children gonna be housed over there,” she added. “All I know is the building was purchased.”
Taylor, the Social Circle city manager, said more community engagement would be “stepping in the right direction,” but “does not change our opinion at all about the building.”
Taylor added that the city would be simply unable to provide the detention center with the supply of water it would need to function.
He said the state permits Social Circle to draw 1 million gallons per day from the nearby Alcove River, and currently, it uses about 800,000 gallons per day during peak point in the summer. He estimates that a large detention facility would need at least a million gallons a day on its own.
In addition to the strain on the city’s water supply, Taylor said the city’s sewage system, police, hospital and the fire department will be unable to accommodate the facility’s needs.
The city would nearly double overnight, once 10,000 detainees are housed and workers come into the city.
“Usually it takes time for communities to adapt to rapid growth and it doesn’t seem like we’re going to have that opportunity,” Taylor said.
Valerie Walthart, a resident of Social Circle, said parents are worried about the safety of their children because of the warehouse’s proximity to the city’s only elementary school, less than a mile away.
“I only have one child and I love that I have been able to provide for her an upbringing in a community where people still leave their doors unlocked,” Walthart, who has lived in Social Circle for 26 years, said.
But she said that “for the first time ever since I’ve lived here, I am cautious when I tell people where I live because I don’t want that [the detention facility] to be the first thing that people think of when they think of Social Circle.”
