Immigrant detention in ICE Atlanta field office basement continues at higher rate

José Manuel “David” Gómez had been living in Georgia for more than 20 years when he was arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement while en route to an air conditioner repair job. The June arrest took place in Banks County, roughly 80 miles northeast of Atlanta.

Immigration authorities drove the Mexican national to ICE’s field office in downtown Atlanta — a building with holding cells in its basement that lack showers and beds and provides no opportunity for visits from loved ones or attorneys.

Gómez said he remained there for three days, sleeping on the floor of a crowded cell with no air conditioning before being moved to another detention facility.

“Everything there was horrible,” he said.

Gomez isn’t the first person to be held for days in a facility meant to keep detainees for no more than 12 hours, according to ICE policy.

Last fall, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported on ICE’s use of its Atlanta field office during the first six months of the Trump administration to regularly detain immigrants for longer than 24 hours.

From January through July 2025, more than 1,200 people were held in excess of 24 hours inside the field office, with four people there for more than a month and one person spending nearly three months inside the temporary holding cells.

More recently released detention data shows ICE is using the facility at an accelerated rate.

From Aug. 1 through mid-October of 2025, ICE’s Atlanta field office held 1,641 immigrants for stays that exceeded 24 hours, according to federal data on ICE book-ins obtained by the Deportation Data Project. The project, a group of academics and lawyers, collects and posts immigration enforcement datasets obtained through the Freedom of Information Act.

The longest stay in that stretch was 100 consecutive days, by a 52-year-old Venezuelan national with no felony conviction, the data shows. He was deported Sept. 20.

Also among the people detained overnight at the field office during the fall was Godfrey Wade, a Georgia Army veteran who was deported to Jamaica last month. He spent three days at the field office in September, after a traffic stop led to his arrest.

“My dad said that experience was inhumane,” Wade’s daughter, Christian Wade, told the AJC.

In addition to facing crowded conditions and insufficient meals, Christian Wade said her father was unable to communicate with people outside of the field office.

“They were just leaving these folks on the ground in the field office, which is not at all intended to be a residential facility,” said Tony Kozycki, Wade’s immigration attorney. “He started chained to a bench in the field office” before being transferred to the ICE’s Stewart Detention Center in South Georgia.

“This man has a strong, strong spirit,” Kozycki added. “It was something that I don’t think many people could really get through.”

The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to a request for comment from the AJC.

But last fall, Tricia McLaughlin, then an agency spokesperson, told the AJC in a statement that detainees at the Atlanta ICE field office receive three meals a day and have access to phones, showers, legal representation, blankets and medical care.

“When will the media stop covering sob stories of illegal alien processing and detention centers and start focusing on the victims of illegal alien crime?” she wrote in a statement.

ICE’s growing reliance on its downtown Atlanta field office to hold detainees heralded an expanding role by the metro area in immigration detention.

In recent weeks, federal officials closed on the purchase of two industrial warehouses that sit about an hour’s drive away from Atlanta, with the aim of converting them into sprawling detention centers.

Georgia had long been a national leader in immigration detention prior to 2026, but ICE lockups had been relegated to rural stretches of the state, far removed from metro Atlanta and the other urban communities at the center of immigrant life.

Changing approach to detention

The town of Social Circle will be the site of the biggest warehouse-turned-detention center coming to Georgia.

Last month, city officials met with Department of Homeland Security representatives and released a statement outlining the topics discussed. According to the city, DHS shared it plans to implement a “hub and spoke model,” in which smaller processing facilities will feed into larger detention centers.

The Social Circle facility is intended to be one of eight “mega centers” located across the country. It is expected to hold up to 10,000 detainees and will be constructed following a modular design, which will allow capacity to be scaled up or down as needed, according to city officials.

Detainee intake could begin as early as mid-May, they said.

At full capacity, the Social Circle facility would hold over three times the number of immigrants as ICE’s currently busiest detention facility: a tent camp in El Paso that averaged a daily population of just under 3,000 people last month, according to federal data.

ICE’s new detention model would increase the agency’s capacity to 92,600 beds by the end of November, according to a document released last month. As of early February, the agency held roughly 68,300 immigrants in detention.

The planned surge in capacity could reduce the need to use facilities like ICE’s Atlanta field office for overnight detention and make experiences like Gómez’s and Wade’s less common.

After spending three days detained in downtown Atlanta, Gómez was transferred to Stewart Detention Center, where he remained for roughly six months. He was deported to Mexico in late December.

“I have spent more time in the U.S. — I know the U.S. more than my own country,” he said. “It’s been difficult trying to adapt. That’s the truth.”