DHS scraps plans to turn Georgia warehouse into detention mega center, city says

By Andy Rose, CNN

(CNN) — The Trump administration is backing away from its plans to convert a warehouse in a small Georgia city into a “mega center” holding thousands of immigration detainees, just four months after first confirming it had purchased the building.

“The City of Social Circle has received notification from Congressman Mike Collins that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is no longer pursuing an ICE detention facility within the City of Social Circle,” the local government said in a statement Thursday.

The department’s original plans for the facility stated it would be able to accommodate up to 10,000 detainees – nearly double the entire population of Social Circle – along with 2,000 to 2,500 employees.

The federal government paid $128.5 million for the property, the deed shows. That was more than four times the $29.3 million it previously sold for in 2023.

City leaders said it was not immediately clear if the government would sell the property or if it would be used for a different purpose, but they hope it ends up back in private hands.

“The City is hopeful that the property will ultimately return to the local tax base and once again contribute to the economic vitality and long-term success of the Social Circle community,” the statement said.

The announcement was praised by Georgia’s two US senators, Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock – both Democrats who have strongly opposed the warehouse plans since they were first announced.

“From the beginning, the Social Circle community united against this proposal, which risked overwhelming the city’s infrastructure,” Ossoff said in a statement. “This news proves yet again that public pressure and opposition works.”

The warehouse plans drew quick and fierce opposition in Social Circle, part of a politically red county where President Donald Trump won more than 70% of the vote in the 2024 presidential election.

The news comes as DHS is scrapping plans for conversion of a total of seven recently purchased warehouses into detention facilities – from Roxbury, New Jersey, to Salt Lake City, Utah – according to a report from The New York Times, citing documents it obtained.

DHS began rethinking the more than $700 million program to expand immigration detention since Markwayne Mullin succeeded Kristi Noem as Homeland Security secretary, a source told CNN in April. But the administration is still not publicly giving specifics on where the program goes from here.

“From day one, DHS has remained singularly focused on removing the worst of the worst criminal illegal aliens from the United States and is always evaluating the best methods to do so,” a spokesperson said in a statement to CNN on Friday. “These heinous criminals, once arrested, should be removed at lightning speed, not housed on American soil at the taxpayer’s expense. DHS is moving swiftly to utilize EXISTING detention space with our state and county partners.”

Many of the facilities involved in the plans to convert warehouses, including the one in Salt Lake City, have been the subject of lawsuits against the DHS asking judges to stop the projects.

As of Friday, the government had not filed any documents in the pending cases confirming plans to back down, and officials there are watching closely.

The Utah Democratic Party, which said it has not seen any documentation showing a change in DHS’s plans for the warehouse, said in part in a statement that “the decision to now sell or abandon these facilities is fiscal recklessness and an insult to every taxpayer.”

“Salt Lake City is home to immigrants, refugees, and families who have built their lives here, and we will not stand by while the federal government attempts to warehouse human beings in our community like inventory,” the statement said. “Mass detention on this scale is an affront to human dignity, and that’s true no matter the cost – there is no version of this plan that belongs in our city.”

Salt Lake County mayor’s office spokesperson Eric Biggart also told CNN on Friday the office did “not have confirmation from DHS on the release of this facility.”

“However, we hope the reports are true as we would support a sale of the warehouse by DHS,” Biggart said.

That same caution was expressed in Oakwood, Georgia, a community only 40 miles away from Social Circle where another warehouse was set to be turned into a detainee processing center.

“We won’t believe it until there is an official statement plus a legitimate owner/tenant of the property moved in, to be real honest,” Ari Mathé, a local attorney who has spearheaded opposition to the Oakwood warehouse project, told CNN in an email Friday.

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CNN’s Rafael Romo, Devon Sayers, Annie Grayer and Michael Williams contributed to this report.