Social Circle resident: ICE facility ‘will affect my family’
Valerie Walthart has lived in the small Georgia town of Social Circle for the last 26 years. She is bracing for what she describes as a potential heavy hit to her quality of life.
Later this year, Immigration and Customs Enforcement will begin operating a sprawling detention center out of what is currently an empty industrial warehouse. The agency is expected to hold upward of 8,500 people in the facility, which sits a mile away from Walthart’s home.
Walthart on Thursday joined immigrant community advocates and Democratic state lawmakers during a news conference at the Georgia State Capitol, where they criticized the federal government’s plan for Social Circle.
“This facility will affect my family and me personally,” Walthart said.
She said operating the massive detention center risks overwhelming the city’s water and sewage infrastructure, roads and emergency response personnel.
“This facility will generate more EMS calls per day” than Social Circle can handle, Walthart said. “We would like to think that the federal government has a plan in place to assist us … but we don’t know for sure.”
Kimberly Diemert, a member of the Georgia chapter of the liberal activist group 50501, said the ICE detention center will be down the street from Social Circle’s sole elementary school.
Area children “will now be forced to be in the presence of armed federal operators in their own community,” she said. There is worry, she added, “about what it will mean for them to live near something they were never told was coming.”
Diemert and Democratic state Sens. Josh McLaurin and Harold Jones decried the procurement process that resulted in ICE owning the Social Circle warehouse.
The federal government purchased the property quickly and without involving local authorities. It also bypassed the bidding process undergirding most federal contracting.
“There was no transparency to match the level of impact,” Diemert said. “Local leaders were kept in the dark.
“If this is the model, this is the wrong model.”
Speakers urged federal and state leadership to engage with city and county residents going forward, and give them access to planning documents.
“Social Circle is small, about 5,000 residents, with one stoplight, one high school, one grocery store and one ZIP code,” Walthart said. “We’re big on family, agriculture, and mom and pop business.
“We just want to know that our water, roads, schools and loved ones will be respected and kept safe for us to use and cherish. And while we continue to ask questions, we continue to get very little answers.”
Also participating in Thursday’s news conference were two legislators who were part of a group that visited South Georgia’s Stewart Detention Center earlier this year: Democratic state Reps. Ruwa Romman and Eric Bell.
Detainees there described “an experience of neglect,” Romman said.
Stewart “is a place that has been running for a long time. So now imagine what these warehouses full of people are going to be and what they will look like,” she added.
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