Georgia town defies ICE: No water for planned detention warehouse
City officials in Social Circle are pushing back against a Trump administration plan to convert a sprawling warehouse into a massive immigrant detention facility capable of holding up to 8,500 people at a time.
After repeatedly expressing concern to federal officials that the city’s water and sewer infrastructure is not capable of accommodating such an enormous facility, city officials revealed this week that they placed a lock on the warehouse’s water meter — effectively cutting off water and sewer service from the empty warehouse before it can be converted.
City manager Eric Taylor said the lock will stay in place until federal officials respond to the city’s questions and concerns. He added that an official from Immigration and Customs Enforcement was informed of the lock shortly after the Feb. 3 sale, when the ICE representative asked how to establish an account with the city.
Channel 2 Action News first reported news of the locked water meter.
“The lock is there until ICE indicates how water and sewer will be served without exceeding our limited infrastructure capacity,” read a statement from the city, released Monday. “The City of Social Circle is not satisfied that an adequate engineering analysis has been conducted.”
ICE did not respond to a request for comment from The Atlanta Journal-Constitution on Tuesday. Department of Homeland Security officials have previously told the city they planned to use its water system “during off-peak hours,” or that it could either truck in water or dig a well.
Taylor said earlier this month that none of those options are viable solutions. He said the city currently uses between 80% and 90% of its permitted draw from the Alcovy River to supply drinking water to residents and businesses.
“How are we supposed to provide water for an additional 10,000 people?” Taylor said March 3. “The water isn’t there, no matter what time of the day you try to pull it.”
Taylor said the other ideas are dead ends, as well. It would take hundreds of trucks per day to haul in enough water for a facility that size, and city engineers estimate it would take 30 to 60 wells to provide water to the facility in that manner.
“What happens to everyone else who rely on the well water to supply their households?” Taylor said. “It is not sustainable at all.”
ICE’s planned detention center would more than double Social Circle’s population, which was listed as 3,974 people in the 2020 census. The city, located about 50 miles east of Atlanta, provides water service to 3,500 customers, Beth Kinney, manager of Social Circle’s water treatment plant, has said.
Both of Georgia’s senators, Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, have condemned the warehouse conversion and requested ICE pull back from the plan.
“Folks in Social Circle voted for this president overwhelmingly,” Warnock said of President Donald Trump during a March 3 visit to Social Circle. “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 and place a massive detention center next to an elementary school.”
They also “didn’t vote for potential boil-water advisories or sewer overflows because this administration has overstrained their city’s resources,” Warnock added.
Sewage treatment concern
According to documents shared with the city, the warehouse will include holding areas, gyms and recreational spaces, courtroom facilities, intake areas, cafeterias, laundry facilities, on-site health services and a gun range.
When operational, the detention center will have a sewage demand of over 1 million gallons per day, an ICE document shows. But according to Social Circle officials, the city’s current wastewater system is already at capacity processing 660,000 gallons a day.
“It cannot accommodate an increase in usage of this magnitude,” the city’s Monday statement says.
The ICE planning documents mention two other potential sources of wastewater treatment — an existing facility in nearby Newton County and a planned new facility in Social Circle that will have an initial capacity of 1.5 million gallons per day before eventually expanding to 3 million gallons.
But construction for the new sewer treatment plant has not begun and will take 12 to 18 months to complete, and the existing Newton County plant does not connect to Social Circle’s utility system, according to city officials.
To avoid impacting local infrastructure, ICE says it plans to build an on-site wastewater treatment system.
“Our engineers believed this approach to be the most practical,” the government’s planning document reads. “This system is self-contained and will have no impact to the surrounding properties.”
But even that concerns Social Circle authorities.
“What remains notably unclear is where the resulting liquid effluent would actually be discharged. … This raises concerns regarding potential impacts to local wetlands depending on the final disposal location,” a city statement reads.
ICE recently purchased another warehouse for conversion to a detention center in metro Atlanta, this one in Hall County, where officials have expressed similar concerns about their infrastructure capacity to accommodate the facility.
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