Immigrants’ Rights Groups Oppose ICE Mega-Prison in Social Circle, Georgia
February 5, 2026
CONTACT INFORMATION
James Woo, Director of Communications, media@advancingjustice-atlanta.org
Lilly Gonzalez, Director of Communications - media@nipnlg.org
Atlanta, GA – On February 4, 2026, the City of Social Circle, Georgia announced that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is moving forward with opening a mega-prison for immigrants in its city. The facility in question is a 1 million square foot warehouse where DHS intends to detain 8,500 people. The Social Circle warehouse is slated to become one of the largest immigration prisons in the United States. DHS may begin detaining people at the warehouse as early as April, according to the statement issued by the City of Social Circle.
Immigrants’ rights organizations who have been working with local communities across Georgia to push back on detention for years denounce DHS’s reckless plan to convert a warehouse—a building not intended for human habitation—into a massive U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention facility. Along with Asian Americans Advancing Justice - Atlanta and the National Immigration Project, Project South, Sur Legal Collaborative, Georgia Detention Watch, Detention Watch Network, Georgia Latino Alliance for Human Rights, ACLU of Georgia, the Georgia-Alabama American Immigration Lawyers Association, National Immigration Law Center, El Refugio, and the Georgia Asylum and Immigration Network (GAIN) stand in fierce opposition to ICE’s planned Social Circle detention center.
If DHS is allowed to proceed with opening the Social Circle facility, it will cement Georgia’s role as a key node in the web of the detention and deportation machine that has been terrorizing families and communities across the country. The undersigned organizations stand in fierce opposition to this mega-prison—a deal which DHS brokered without any transparency or public input, and against the unanimous and vocal opposition to the facility by Social Circle’s city officials and residents.
This administration’s use of warehouses to imprison people is a disturbing development that raises stark civil and human rights concerns. Within Georgia and across the country, people detained in immigration prisons face cruel and inhumane conditions such as medical neglect, overcrowding, and inadequate food and water. In Georgia alone, there are already four immigrant detention facilities which have longstanding documented human rights abuses and civil rights violations, spotlighted in national and international platforms. In 2025, Georgia ranked fourth in the nation for arrests by ICE, an agency which has already claimed the lives of eight people this year alone.
“People of all political stripes are horrified at the violence that masked ICE agents are inflicting on communities,” said Samantha C. Hamilton, Senior Litigation Staff Attorney at Asian Americans Advancing Justice - Atlanta. “DHS knows that the only way it can pursue its agenda of mass detention is by opening new prisons under cover of darkness, without transparency. More empty beds means more financial incentive to fill them. We know that ICE dehumanizes people in detention by torturing them and making money off of their suffering. The fact that ICE now seeks to detain people in actual warehouses reveals that they really don’t view immigrants as human. Nobody can fix this inherently broken system. ICE must be abolished.”
“There is no humane version of immigration detention,” said Stephanie Alvarez-Jones, Southeast Regional Attorney at the National Immigration Project. “The secrecy which DHS has used in its efforts to secure these warehouses to use as detention facilities is not incidental; it is a defining feature of a system designed to operate beyond public accountability and moral scrutiny. The proposed facility in Social Circle is part of a cruel strategy to expand a system that has already taken far too many lives. We refuse to accept a future where our communities are asked to host human cages. We stand with communities in Georgia and across the country who are saying NO to detention expansion.”
It has been powerful to see activists organically organize in Social Circle to denounce this development in the legacy of Social Circle. “The City of Social Circle has not been asked for, nor has it provided, any input related to this evaluation or planning process,” the city stated in a press release. Furthermore, Social Circle officials warn that this facility would more than triple the local population, overwhelming city utilities and endangering the peace of a community located near a local elementary school.
Organizations will not stand by as the federal government turns Georgia’s warehouses into death traps. We demand an immediate end to the detention centers and shift toward policies that honor the dignities of our immigrants rather than the expansion of a system that aims to tear families and communities apart.
Asian Americans Advancing Justice-Atlanta is a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization dedicated to protecting the civil rights of Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders (AANHPI), and other marginalized communities in Georgia and the Southeast.
