The Trump administration’s treatment of Social Circle is unconscionable

Eric Taylor, the city manager of Social Circle, learned about the plan on the day after Christmas. He was driving back to Georgia from his mother’s house in Indiana when he received a panicked phone call from a member of the city council.

Had he seen the story in The Washington Post listing Social Circle as a site for a new federal immigration detention center?

Taylor had no idea what the council member or The Washington Post were talking about. “I’ve been trying to get people on the phone ever since,” he told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

A phone call with the office of U.S. Rep. Mike Collins, whose district includes Social Circle, last week confirmed the Department of Homeland Security has purchased a massive, newly constructed warehouse inside the city limits. Collins said the agency plans to use it as a detainment center for undocumented immigrants taken into custody by ICE. A deed filed publicly last week showed that DHS bought the warehouse for $128 million, nearly five times its latest assessed value, from PNK S1, LLC, a New York-based commercial real estate developer.

Credit: Miguel Martinez-Jimenez

Credit: Miguel Martinez-Jimenez

The hulking 1.2 million square-foot concrete structure was envisioned by local leaders to store something like Amazon packages or car parts, but never people. Along with its size, it is equally shocking for its location, across the street from local businesses and up the hill from the new Social Circle Elementary School, with its red-roofed play set and front door clearly visible from the street.

“We would not open a five-cell jail that close to a school,” Taylor said of the city government.

The lack of information from the Trump administration to city officials so far been nothing short of egregious. To this day, the city has never had a meeting or phone call with DHS to answer its most basic, pressing questions.

“I’m concerned about our water and sewer infrastructure. We don’t have it,” Taylor said. “I’ve been trying to tell people, but nobody’s listening.”

Taylor and other officials are also worried about the warehouse’s effect on public safety. The city typically has two police officers on duty at any one time, along with four fire fighters. Do they need to hire more? Would they be first responders for the ICE facility? Nobody has told them.

What about Social Circle’s tax revenue? The warehouse was approved to increase the tax base in an area of the state with spiking property taxes. But now that it’s owned by the federal government, the warehouse is tax-exempt and the revenue is gone.

“People are making these decisions at the federal level without having any understanding of the communities they are directly impacting, with no effort to even try,” Taylor said.

Credit: Ben Hendren/AJC

Credit: Ben Hendren/AJC

Local officials and residents have reached out to state and federal elected officials in an urgent effort to derail DHS’s plans. Just this week, U.S. Sen. Roger Wicker managed to kill an ICE warehouse planned in his home state of Mississippi.

But Gov. Brian Kemp’s office has told local leaders he’s powerless to stop a federal decision. The state’s two Democratic U.S. senators, Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, have said they both oppose the decision, and Ossoff wrote a letter to DHS with Social Circle mayor David Keener asking them to pick a more suitable area, but they’ve gotten no response.

DHS has communicated only with Collins, a Republican challenging Ossoff for Senate, who has said he opposes the location of the warehouse, but “fully supports the mission” of mass deportations. Although he asked the department to “reevaluate” the location, he seems to have been brushed off, too. The ICE facility is happening anyway.

Late Thursday, DHS contacted the city to set up a time to talk. What those talks will yield is anyone’s guess, but local residents need answers.

Also Thursday, Warnock introduced an amendment to a DHS funding bill that would prohibit the use of federal funds for the “acquisition, construction, renovation, or expansion” of immigrant detention facilities in Social Circle and in nearby Oakwood.

John Miller’s farm sits across the street from what may soon be the Social Circle ICE facility. Not only does his daughter ride her horse in fields across from the warehouse, he has a child at Social Circle Elementary.

He, along with Taylor and multiple other residents I spoke with, are deeply frustrated by what they see as Georgia leaders’ initial lack of urgency on their behalf and by a decision from the Trump administration that has turned their world upside down in an instant.

“We are supposed to be a government of the people, by the people and for the people,” Miller said. “You can’t say that’s who you are if you leave the people out of the conversation, and that’s exactly what has happened in all of these cases.”

Opposition to the plan has united local residents in the deeply conservative area, regardless of their politics.

Parents can’t stand the thought of school buses driving past the warehouse. Pastors worry for the thousands of people detained there. Businesses expect having the equivalent of a giant prison in town will keep visitors away. Even Republicans who voted for Trump say they never signed up for this.

Before all of this, Taylor had been trying to plan ahead for Social Circle’s organic growth, while retaining the charm of the place that calls itself “Georgia’s best little town.”

Now he worries about what his city will look like five and ten years from now.

“They are just steamrolling this thing through,” he said of the federal government. “If they have this apparent lack of regard for what’s going on here, are they even going to care about what they do and what they leave behind?”

I think we all know the answer to that.