SOCIAL CIRCLE, Ga. — Until recently, this rural city about 45 minutes east of Atlanta was best known for its Blue Willow Inn cookbooks featuring recipes for Southern dishes such as baked pineapple casserole and kudzu blossom jelly.
Lately, however, the community has been trying to stave off a new identity of “prison town” as it fights the opening of what could become the nation’s largest immigration detention center, holding up to 10,000 people.
Walton County, home to this city of about 5,500, voted overwhelmingly for President Donald Trump in 2024. But, as the administration’s mass deportation strategy hits closer to home — with plans moving forward to transform a more than 1 million-square-foot warehouse into a holding pen — locals say the city’s infrastructure just can’t handle such an influx of people.
This month, Social Circle filed a lawsuit in federal court against U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The city’s complaint argues that the operation of a detention facility, what it calls a “mega center,” would harm public health, strain the local fresh water and sewage treatment systems, and overburden emergency medical services “due to Social Circle’s modest EMS capacity and DHS’ nebulous plan for emergency transport,” referring to the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE.
“The community is very unified,” City Manager Eric Taylor said. “We want them to go away.”
Social Circle is one of several communities across the country thrust into a charged national debate about the administration’s mass immigrant deportation strategy. On the campaign trail, Trump said migrants were occupying American towns. But local leaders, state attorneys general, advocacy groups, and others in Arizona, Maryland, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Texas claim the administration is doing the same thing by plopping detention centers into communities without the capacity to handle a surge of people.
Last year, Todd Lyons, who is serving as acting director of ICE until the end of May, described a goal to have the mass deportation operate with the efficiency of Amazon.com. Deportations would move “like Prime, but with human beings,” he said at a border security expo in Phoenix.
ICE is now putting every person they seek to deport in detention, including those with no criminal records, without the possibility of release on bond. In January, the agency held almost twice as many people as it had that same month in 2024 under President Joe Biden.
However, while many supporters remain aligned with Trump’s immigration stance, some locals fear their city’s stability will be jeopardized. “Social Circle is not exactly flourishing, but it’s making it,” said Gareth Fenley, a retired social worker who ran for state Senate in 2024 as a Democrat and was not among the locals who voted for Trump.
“If Social Circle becomes a prison town,” she said, “we’re gonna lose what we have.”
‘I Thought It Was a Joke’
In February, DHS purchased the 235-acre site in Social Circle for almost $129 million, nearly five times its assessed value. It plans to house more people there than at the Rikers Island Correctional Facility in New York City, and nearly triple the number of people now housed at the country’s biggest immigration detention facility, which is in El Paso, Texas.
“I thought it was a joke,” said John Miller, when he first read about the plans last year. He and his wife, Kathlene, have lived in Social Circle for 21 years. When they bump into neighbors, Kathlene knows their children’s names, and John can cite the kids’ baseball stats. Their 50-acre horse farm is less than a mile from the elementary school, and right across the street from the detention center site.
The Millers support Trump’s stance on immigration but feel that turning the vacant warehouse into a detention center would re-create the very problems his administration is trying to solve. Whether people are concentrated in a detention center or out in the public, “they’re still there,” John Miller said.
DHS estimates that the facility would require about 1 million gallons of water daily, according to the city’s suit, which alleges that volume would bleed residents’ taps dry and contaminate local streams with sewage. Emergency medical calls from the detention center, the lawsuit claims, would overwhelm the city’s first responders, which Taylor said clock in at 14 firefighters, 15 police officers, and two school resource officers. The city relies on Walton County for ambulance services.
Additionally, Social Circle would live under an ever-present threat of a major disease outbreak, the lawsuit said, adding that the federal government didn’t conduct the needed environmental reviews or solicit community input beforehand.
Taylor said federal officials had only one meeting with local leaders and brushed off concerns about water, sewage, and emergency care, which administration officials said the site wouldn’t need to use. “I don’t buy that,” Taylor said. “And that’s the problem.”
Supercharging Health Concerns
Current DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin has said he is reviewing plans made by his predecessor, Kristi Noem, to transform warehouses like this one into detention facilities. And the department’s inspector general is investigating whether the federal government overpaid for some of the buildings. Mullin also said officials are reviewing agency policies and working with community leaders. “We want to be good partners,” said Lauren Bis, a DHS spokesperson.
Still, the administration’s swift escalation of immigrant detention has exacerbated long-standing allegations of medical neglect for those in custody across the country and led to the highest number of detainee deaths in at least two decades.
Three detention facilities in Folkston, Georgia, about an hour north of Jacksonville, Florida, issued 130 emergency calls from Feb. 4, 2025, to Feb. 3, 2026, according to dispatch reports obtained by KFF Health News through a public records request. The calls from the facilities, which hold about 2,000 people, were for wide-ranging reasons, including anaphylaxis, assaults, suicide attempts, overdoses, seizures, strokes, head injuries from falls, and other health issues.
GEO Group, ICE’s largest contractor, which runs the Folkston facility, provides “around-the-clock access to medical care” and relies on emergency medical services as needed, said Christopher Ferreira, director of corporate relations.
ERO El Paso Camp East Montana, built on a Texas military base, is currently the nation’s largest detention center and holds about 2,500 people. In the five months from Aug. 17, 2025, to Jan. 20, 2026, about 130 emergency medical calls were made from the site, according to city records. Several detainees have died at the facility; several others have tested positive for tuberculosis, measles, or covid-19.
Amentum Services, which recently took over management of the facility, did not respond to questions about emergency calls.
Even bigger detention facilities, such as the “mega center” planned in Social Circle, would only supercharge those health issues and bring them to new communities, said Michelle Brané, who was immigration ombudsman at the Department of Homeland Security under Biden. Existing facilities already suffer from staffing shortages, poor ventilation and hygiene, and insufficient medical care, she said.
The proposed facilities are enormous and generally built for boxes, not people, she said. “There’s no way, without extreme cost, both to the community and just in dollars, to make these safe for humans,” she said.
In the meantime, people such as Kathlene Miller said they feel that Social Circle has become “collateral damage” in the larger debate over immigration. “We’re like the children in a divorce,” she said.
But Social Circle may face an uphill battle. Taylor said Walton County leaders and the state of Georgia have been silent on the center.
“They say it’s federal issues, that they have no jurisdiction,” he said. “They don’t have any interest in helping us.”
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