Crowd protests planned ICE detention facility

Released by Indivisible: Georgia District 10:

Monroe, GA—The message from a bi-partisan rally that drew nearly 600 people to Monroe on a rainy Sunday afternoon was clear: A mega ICE detention center is not welcome in Walton County.

“Our efforts to stop ICE from building this detention center are a long shot,” Gareth Finley, co-leader of Indivisible Boldly Blue of Walton County and one of the lead organizers of the gathering told the crowd. But she added, “We can slow this process. We can support the City of Social Circle government, which is doing everything possible to stall it out.”

The rally was co-organized by Indivisible Boldly Blue and IndivisibleGA10, which covers all of Georgia’s 10^th Congressional District, in partnership with 50501 Georgia and 15 other citizens’ groups from the region around Walton County.

The message was one of unity across political parties in opposition to the placement of a mega DHS detention center housing 10,000 detainees in Social Circle, which has a population of 5,000.  The proposed DHS facility, which is scheduled to open as early as April, would be five times larger than the largest prison in Georgia.

“Let’s Make it Clear. Detention Center NOT Welcome Here” was the slogan for the gathering, which was held on the lawn of the historic courthouse in downtown Monroe. Despite the periodic rain that fell, the crowd grew steadily throughout the 90-minute event, with passing drivers honking loudly in support.

Speakers detailed the many reasons Social Circle’s city officials have been unanimously opposed to the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) plan to transform a newly built 1.2 million square-foot warehouse in their city into a mega detention center—opposition shared by a majority of area residents, according to a recent poll.

“The fact is, we don’t have the water,” said John Miller, a small business and farm owner in Social Circle. “Our water system is at capacity and is so stressed that if you turn on a faucet (in some subdivisions), the water is brown.”

He noted that when the industrial warehouse was first proposed in 2022, the water impact statement for the building projected that it would use 29,600 gallons of water per day.

But the city now estimates that transforming the warehouse into a detention center will mean the facility will use 500,00-700,000 gallons of water per day, Miller said.  “That is as much as our entire town uses in a day.”

DHS’s proposal to fix that problem relies on water from another county that has no way to reach the warehouse, Miller said.  Plans to expand the existing Social Circle water system will take at least two years to complete.

Miller also pointed out that DHS paid the warehouse owners more than $100 million in taxpayers’ money above the value at which Walton County had assessed the property at the end of 2025. DHS never informed the city or its residents about the project. The city only learned about the plan in late December from a story in The Washington Post. DHS officials then refused to meet or talk with Social Circle city officials until after the purchase of the warehouse was complete.

“Whether you consider yourself a liberal, conservative or independent,” Miller said, “the most glaringly objective truth of all about this detention center is that,if it was going to be so great, they wouldn’t have hidden it from us in the first place.”

Rick Burt, a retired architect, co-leader of IndivisibleGA10, and emcee for the rally, told the gathering that based on the average cost of holding people in detention, the annual cost to taxpayers to maintain the detention center in Social Circle with 10,000 detainees would be almost $700 million per year.  That amount would cover the entire annual city budget for Social Circle for 46 years.

Other speakers addressed issues of the community’s identity.

“That warehouse – it could be something that builds the town, real jobs. Small businesses. Something that the community actually chose and is proud of,” said Lisa Wohlrab, a retired Air Force veteran. “Instead, someone else is trying to make that choice for you.  And they’re not the ones who have to live with it.”

Henry Anthoine, a Walton County student who also spoke, agreed. “Are we OK with driving our kids to school every morning, passing a place where families are being separated?  Are we OK with tucking our children into bed at night, knowing that down the street another child is crying because their parent was just taken away?,” he asked to loud shouts of “No!” from the crowd.  “Once something like this is built, it becomes part of your identity.  I don’t want Walton County to be the place where this happened.  I don’t want to have to tell people I’m from where the detention center is. I want it to be known as the place where we stood up against it.”