SOCIAL CIRCLE, Ga. — After being being “blown off” and “blindsided” by federal officials working to bring a new Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility to Social Circle, city leaders finally got their meeting to discuss the detention center.
Channel 2’s Tom Regan spoke to Social Circle City Manager Scott Taylor, who said the city is still “considering all actions available to us at this point, to stop this from happening.”
As part of the discussion with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, city officials were provided with more detailed plans about the planned one million-square-foot facility and the expected thousands of detainees to be held there.
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City officials told Regan that the large facility planned for Social Circle was part of a larger national change in ICE detention strategy, based on their meeting with DHS.
Now, Channel 2 Action News has learned more about what the new strategy for ICE detentions will be, including the facilities planned for Georgia.
Social Circle officials said DHS told them the agency “will fully implement a new detention model by the end of Fiscal Year 2026.”
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According to documents from DHS shared publicly by the City of Social Circle, the federal agency plans to consolidate hundreds of facilities spread out across the U.S. into just a few dozen instead.
The facility in Social Circle is planned to be one of what the DHS told the city were eight planned “mega centers,” of 34 total detention centers, nationally.
In documents shared with the city, DHS said the new detention model it plans to use going forward will include the purchase and renovation of eight large-scale detention centers and 16 processing sites, in addition to the purchase of what the agency called 10 “turnkey” facilities already in use for Enforcement and Removal Operations.
The cost of the new strategy is expected to cost $38.3 billion, funded through allocations in 2025’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
According to documents from DHS, the new detention model is “designed to strategically increase bed capacity to 92,600 beds,” with all facilities planned to be active by November.
Large-scale facilities like the one planned for Social Circle are expected to be able to “securely and humanely house 7,000 to 10,000 detainees,” DHS said.
The City of Social Circle said in an update that the agency had told it the range of detainees was expected to more likely be between 7,500 and 10,000 locally, held for a period of less than 60 days, on average.
Additional records from DHS shared with city officials indicated the facility would be 1.2 miles from Social Circle Elementary School and one mile from Burkes Field Park, a residential development.
City officials said after meeting with DHS about the facility plan that their concerns over infrastructure, safety and resource capacities were not addressed in a manner they found satisfactory.
“To be clear, the City has repeatedly communicated that it does not have the capacity or resources to accommodate this demand, and no proposal presented to date has demonstrated otherwise,” city officials said in a statement.
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