Warnock visits Ga. town fighting ICE detention center

SOCIAL CIRCLE, Ga. — Sen. Raphael Warnock visited Walton County’s Social Circle as the city grapples with a federal proposal to open an immigration detention center there.

Last month, the Democratic senator proposed an amendment to the latest Department of Homeland Security funding package that would prohibit federal funds from being used to acquire detention centers in Social Circle as well as Hall County’s Oakwood.

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The controversy began when the city of Social Circle said Homeland Security informed it of its purchase of a warehouse facility on East Hightower Road to detain roughly 10,000 immigrants. That’s double Social Circle’s population of about 5,000 people.

“This project is an engineering infeasibility,” said City Manager Eric Taylor. “We simply do not have the water and sewer capacity to handle the demands of what would effectively be tripling the population of our city practically overnight.”

City leaders argue the water and sewage systems can’t handle the sudden increase, and several residents have taken to the streets to protest.

Taylor said this has never been about making a political statement on the current administration’s immigration policy – it’s just about protecting their community in the long term.

“We don’t have the infrastructure that it takes to serve a facility of this size,” said Taylor. “DHS did do an analysis, but we feel like there are some fundamental flaws in that analysis that don’t take into account some primary considerations, such as one of the sewer they were talking about using not even connected to our system. It’s in a different county.”

Warnock said he is working to help the people of Social Circle and Oakwood.

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“The people of Georgia want secure borders; they do not want massive immigration detention centers in their backyards,” Warnock said. “If the Trump administration focused on getting violent criminals out of the country, we would not need new detention centers straining Georgia’s rural communities. That’s why I’m standing with the residents of Social Circle and Oakwood and fighting to block these detention facilities from towns that don’t want them.”

During Warnock’s visit to the site, Taylor and Mayor David Keener showed him through their water treatment and sewer plants, as well as an elementary school about a mile down the road from the site.

“Folks in Social Circle voted for this president overwhelmingly, but here’s what they didn’t vote for: They did not vote for a 10,000-person detention center that will triple the size of their town,” said Warnock.

Republican U.S. Rep. Mike Collins said last week he is in favor of an ICE facility like this, but hears the concerns from city leaders.

“We just want to make sure that the infrastructure is there, that the facility that they do pick is able to handle it, handle it safely,” said Collins.

Warnock assured city leaders he will take their concerns back to D.C., and Taylor said if this facility does come to fruition later this spring or summer, he’s not sure what that will mean for the residents.

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