The warehouse 50 miles east of Atlanta near Interstate 20 is not much to look at.
It’s really just a box: an over 1-million-square-foot, gray box dotted with semi-trailer loading docks. It’s built to be a distribution center. Communities across the country have been shocked to learn that the Department of Homeland Security wants to use warehouses like this one for detention space amid the ongoing immigration crackdown.
While other attempts to lease or buy properties like this one on East Hightower Road in Social Circle have fallen apart, this one is a done deal. A sales deed shows DHS paid just under $129 million for the space.
Social Circle City Manager Eric Taylor really wishes it hadn’t.
“This is not something, hands down, that the city can support,” Taylor said.
Just over 5,000 people live in Social Circle, which now includes the Homeland Security-bought warehouse which will be used to hold detained immigrants. Taylor said politically, it looks like that shouldn’t be a problem for residents.
”Social Circle went approximately 73% in favor of Donald Trump in the last election,” Taylor said.
The local opposition to what Immigration and Customs Enforcement wants here is not about the immigration crackdown. It’s about infrastructure.
“The frustration here is that they’re looking at a building that was not built for human habitation,” Taylor said. “There’s nothing more than a shell of a building.”
Now leaders in the city of Oakwood, 45 miles to the north of Social Circle on Interstate 985, are threading their own needle of opposing the ICE plan to use a warehouse there to detain up to 1,500 people while not opposing the mission of ICE in general.
“We want to be explicit: The City of Oakwood supports ICE’s mission of apprehending and detaining individuals with criminal records,” reads one part of an official statement from city leaders. “Our concern is not with the agency’s lawful role in public safety. Our concern is with the proposed location and the process by which this site was selected, which occurred without consultation, coordination, or impact analysis involving any local governing body.”
In Social Circle, Eric Taylor said he would like consultation, too, but ICE won’t answer his calls. If it did, he would tell ICE: The city doesn’t have enough drinking water.
“The permit we have to draw water out of the river’s only a million gallons a day,” he said.
Taylor said in the heat of Georgia summer, residents will use right up to that limit. Now toss in an ICE detention center which will effectively triple the city’s population, if it holds up to 10,000 people as planned.
DHS did not respond to a GPB request for comment. But that figure comes from Republican Mike Collins, Social Circle’s representative in the U.S. House and, apparently, the only Georgia elected official who has managed to talk directly to DHS about their plans.
“I fully support ICE, 100%,” Collins told reporters during a recent trip to the Georgia state Capitol.
Collins is running against Democratic incumbent Sen. Jon Ossoff for the U.S. Senate. Collins says he agrees with people like Taylor that the detention center is a bad fit for the town, but he says there’s still room to make it work.
“I think that as long as DHS comes in there and sits down and says, ‘This is what we found, this is how we’re going to operate this,’ and takes care of any of the concerns for the local officials there to make sure that they don’t impact them negatively, then they’ll be able to operate that facility,” he told reporters.
Residents are doubtful but also scared to be forthright about their reservations.
Take the mother whose child attends the elementary school less than a mile from the ICE warehouse. We’re not using her name because she says she’s afraid of community blowback.
“Are they gonna put a 16-foot barbed wire fence up that the kids have to see every day?” she asked about the warehouse.
She said she’s tired of the “told you so” comments on social media about her neighbors in this heavily Republican area, too.
“‘You guys voted for this.’ No, the detention center next to my child’s school was not on my ballot,” she said. “That wasn’t what I voted for.”
She’s also a real estate agent and said people have already reached out to her to sell their homes, worried about their property values if Social Circle becomes a “prison town.”
Another downtown business owner who also asked GPB not to use their name said they are struggling to reconcile what they believe is right — that the immigration crackdown has gone too far and they don’t want their hometown to be a part of it — with the need to make a living.
“Yeah, it is very intense,” they said. “It’s been weighing on me since all this came out.”
In the balance, they said, are the kids to feed. Worrying about that has so far meant they have kept to themselves.
“At some point, if things are bad enough, there comes a point where I guess you just have to sacrifice that,” they said. “But when is that line?”
Lifelong Social Circle resident and retired teacher Cindy Goldthwaite was one of a small group in the Bread and Butter Coffee Shop on Thursday morning, organizing their effort to canvass door to door against the ICE warehouse before the shop manager shooed them out the door, telling them their politics weren’t allowed inside.
On the street, before the group met together, she said the whole episode reminded her of her childhood in the 1950s when the school bus would ride by cotton fields at the edge of town where only Black laborers did the hard work of chopping the cotton. Goldthwaite is white.
“And, you know, I didn’t think that much about it,” Goldthwaite said. “But those kinds of images seep into you as a kid. And sometimes they cause indifference.”
As a young person, she said to have asked why things were the way they were would have been “social suicide.” But until she grew up and learned something new, they were foundational. Now she wonders what kind of foundation for life the students at Social Circle Elementary School could be left with after riding by an ICE detention center? There are questions she wants her neighbors to ask.
“What’s fair to these people?” she asked of the future detainees. “What’s fair to the children riding by on the bus?”
The day after Goldthwaite and the rest of the canvassers were made to leave the coffee shop, city leadership posted the latest news on the official Social Circle Facebook page. Social Circle leaders had been told to call at to 2pm to speak with the Deputy Chief of Staff of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, another wing of the Department of Homeland Security.
They called, twice. They left a message. They waited another 45 minutes.
DHS was a no-show.
