SOCIAL CIRCLE, Ga. — Until recently, this rural town about 45 minutes east of Atlanta was best known for its Blue Willow Inn cookbooks that featured recipes for Southern dishes like baked pineapple casserole and kudzu flower jelly.
Lately, however, the community has been trying to avoid a new “prison city” identity as it fights to open what could become the country's largest immigration detention center, with capacity for 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 moves closer to home (with plans underway to transform a more than 1 million-square-foot warehouse into a holding pen), locals say the city's infrastructure simply cannot 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 operating a detention center, what it calls a “megacenter,” would harm public health, overload local freshwater and wastewater treatment systems, and strain emergency medical services “due to Social Circle's modest EMS capacity and DHS's nebulous emergency transportation plan,” a reference to the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE.
“The community is very close-knit,” said City Manager Eric Taylor. “We want them to leave.”
Social Circle is one of several communities across the country involved in an intense national debate over the administration's mass immigrant deportation strategy. During the election campaign, Trump said that immigrants were occupying American cities. But local leaders, state attorneys general, advocacy groups and others in Arizona, Maryland, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Texas say the administration is doing the same thing by setting up detention centers in communities without the capacity to handle a surge of people.
Last year, Todd Lyons, who serves as acting director of ICE until the end of May, outlined the goal of making mass deportation operate with the efficiency of Amazon.com. The deportations would be done “like Prime, but with human beings,” he said at a border security exposé in Phoenix.
ICE is now detaining all people seeking deportation, including those without criminal records, without the possibility of release on bail. In January, the agency retained nearly twice as many people as it did in the same month in 2024 under President Joe Biden.
However, while many supporters remain aligned with Trump's immigration stance, some locals fear that the stability of their city will be compromised. “The Social Circle isn't exactly flourishing, but it's getting there,” 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 city,” he said, “we will lose what we have.”
Social Circle, a city of 5,500 located about 45 miles east of Atlanta, has filed a lawsuit against U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, alleging that plans to open a massive ICE detention center could threaten the city's public health and overwhelm its emergency medical services. (Renuka Rayasam/KFF Health News)
Gareth Fenley is a retired social worker who lives near Social Circle, Georgia. He's running for state Senate in 2024 as a Democrat and says the city's concerns about a proposed immigration detention center are similar to those in other communities. (Renuka Rayasam/KFF Health News)
'I thought it was a joke'
In February, DHS purchased the 235-acre site in Social Circle for nearly $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 currently housed at the country's largest immigration detention center, which is in El Paso, Texas.
“I thought it was a joke,” John Miller said when he first read about the plans last year. He and his wife, Kathlene, have lived in Social Circle for 21 years. When they meet neighbors, Kathlene knows their children's names and John can quote the children's baseball statistics. Their 50-acre horse farm is less than a mile from the elementary school and directly across the street from the detention center.
The Millers support Trump's stance on immigration, but feel that turning the empty warehouse into a detention center would recreate the same problems his administration is trying to solve. Whether people are gathered in a detention center or in public, “they're still there,” John Miller said.
DHS estimates the facility would require about 1 million gallons of water per day, according to the city's lawsuit, which alleges that volume would drain residents' taps and pollute local streams with sewage. Medical emergency calls from the detention center, the lawsuit said, would overwhelm the city's first responders, which Taylor said had 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 the ever-present threat of a major disease outbreak, the lawsuit claims, adding that the federal government failed to conduct necessary environmental reviews or solicit community input beforehand.
Taylor said federal officials only had one meeting with local leaders and dismissed concerns about water, wastewater and emergency care, which administration officials said the site would not need to use. “I don't believe in that,” Taylor said. “And that's the problem.”
John Miller sits in his JK Design office in Social Circle, Georgia. He and his wife, Kathlene, moved to Social Circle 21 years ago and have raised seven children. (Renuka Rayasam/KFF Health News)
Social Circle has filed a lawsuit against U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, alleging that plans to open a mass detention center could threaten the city's public health and overwhelm its emergency medical services. (Renuka Rayasam/KFF Health News)
Supercharged 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 centers. 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 DHS spokeswoman Lauren Bis.
Still, the administration's rapid escalation of immigration detention has exacerbated long-standing accusations of medical neglect of detainees across the country and led to the highest number of detainee deaths in at least two decades.
Three detention centers in Folkston, Georgia, about an hour north of Jacksonville, Florida, issued 130 emergency calls between Feb. 4, 2025, and Feb. 3, 2026, according to dispatch reports obtained by KFF Health News through a public records request. The calls from the facility, which houses about 2,000 people, were for a variety of reasons, including anaphylaxis, assault, suicide attempts, overdoses, seizures, strokes, head injuries from falls and other health problems.
GEO Group, ICE's largest contractor, which manages the Folkston facility, provides “24-hour 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 largest detention center in the country, housing 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 center; 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 larger detention centers, like the “mega center” planned at Social Circle, would only magnify those health problems and bring them to new communities, said Michelle Brané, who was an immigration ombudsman at the Department of Homeland Security during the Biden administration. Existing facilities already suffer from staff shortages, poor ventilation and hygiene, and insufficient medical care, he said.
The proposed facilities are huge and generally built for boxes, not people, he said. “There is no way, without extreme cost, both to the community and just in dollars, to make these products safe for humans,” he said.
Meanwhile, people like Kathlene Miller said they feel Social Circle has become “collateral damage” in the broader immigration debate. “We're like children in a divorce,” he said.
But Social Circle may face an uphill battle. Taylor said leaders in Walton County and the state of Georgia have been silent about the center.
“They say they are federal issues, that they have no jurisdiction,” he said. “They have no interest in helping us.”
