A Georgia City Will Be Drowning in Sewage Thanks to ICE "Mega Center," Say Officials
I recently wrote about the saga of the small Georgian city of Social Circle, a place that voted 73% for Donald Trump and his promised campaign of mass deportation and incarceration, only to find that they suddenly liked the idea a whole lot less when the Department of Homeland Security, without consulting anyone in the area, purchased a newly constructed 1.2 million square foot warehouse on the edge of town (for perhaps five times its market value) with the stated intention of housing 10,000 detainees there. I was writing about Social Circle in the greater context of how MAGA communities and Trump voters love ICE’s brutality in theory but hate having to witness any of its operations in their own backyards, but the practical problems involved in the construction and operation of Social Circle’s facility are potentially even more incredible. According to statements from city officials, ICE’s explanation of how the facility will supposedly work (opening within months) make no sense, particularly when it comes to the massive amounts of water it will require and the disgustingly gargantuan amount of wastewater and sewage it will generate. Turns out, Social Circle, Georgia will likely have bigger problems than an immigration mega prison operating across the street from an elementary school–in fact, they’ll be lucky if they’re not up to their necks in raw sewage.
This assertion is all laid out in detail via a statement from the city itself, in which officials argue that the plan put forth by DHS is completely impossible. Before we get to that, though, let me provide some context on the larger ICE detention center revamp that this facility is meant to fit into.
Acting ICE director Todd Lyons once put it, in brutally dystopian fashion, that his goal for ICE’s revamped detention and deportation system to be “[Amazon] Prime, but with human beings.” That kind of logistical efficiency is easier said than done, however, because those human beings have been placed in nearly 300 different facilities around the country, the vast majority of which are run by private prison corporations or state and local governments leasing facilities to ICE. The huge amounts of funding ($45 billion) provided in Trump’s “big beautiful bill” for immigrant detention are being spent to completely revamp this system and put those detainees under direct ICE detention and control, mostly through the buying and building of warehouse detention facilities.
What the agency is calling the “ICE Detention Reengineering Initiative” would concentrate detainees in roughly 30 national sites of varying size. About 16 would be smaller “processing centers” holding 1,000-1,500 people for shorter average stays and rapid deportations. Another 10 would be “turnkey” facilities, which are preexisting jails and prisons. And eight would be “large scale” or “mega centers” meant to hold huge numbers of detainees in the 7,000 to 10,000 range, with longer detentions in mind, keeping people detained during removal proceedings and appeals. Want to see what one of these modern concentration camps would look like? Here are the blueprints, depicting 80 large prison cells. With 10,000 total detainees, that works out to 125 human beings in each one of those cells.
The Social Circle, Georgia facility would be one of those mega centers–the two others known to date are planned for Socorro, Texas and Trenton, Pennsylvania. They’re the kind of thing that pretty much no town wants for any reason, because as tax-exempt federal buildings they don’t even bring in property tax revenue for the local community. The government intends to build these facilities as quickly as they possibly can, skipping the bidding process via a method that is likely to be rife with waste and fraud.
In Social Circle, meanwhile, the government’s explanation and analysis of how the mega center would work, logistically speaking, appears to be so deluded and full of inconsistencies that it calls into question whether any of these ICE mega facilities have been thought through by anyone who understands the technical challenges of housing 10,000 prisoners in a building, or the problems inherent to tripling a city’s population overnight.
The biggest problem is water, both in terms of available fresh water to draw, and the capacity to handle wastewater. DHS claims in their report to Social Circle that facility will have “no adverse effect on the community and surrounding properties,” but fails utterly to answer any of the questions that the city is desperately asking.
The city of Social Circle currently produces roughly 660,000 gallons per day, “and is already operating at capacity,” according to Social Circle’s press release. The single ICE mega center would add an additional 1,001,683 gallons of sewage per day, according to ICE’s own estimate. In attempting to explain how the city could handle this sudden surge in filth, DHS claimed that part of the wastewater could be processed by the A. Scott Emmons Treatment Facility. Potential problem: “This treatment facility is not owned by the City of Social Circle, is not located within the city limits, is in a different county, and does not connect to the City’s utility system or this building.” DHS’s engineers apparently didn’t bother to look this up.
Good on the city government of Social Circle, GA for making these ICE documents publicly available: www.documentcloud.org/documents/27…
— Marisa Kabas (@marisakabas.bsky.social) Feb 22, 2026 at 2:18 PM
Likewise, DHS’s report also attributes wastewater treatment capacity to a facility that Social Circle plans to build … but is 18 months or more away from actually being constructed, according to the city. DHS, meanwhile, claims that the mega center, currently an empty warehouse, will be built out in its interior and operational in as little as two months this spring. It will immediately begin pumping out the human waste of thousands of people at that time, presumably crippling Social Circle’s sewer systems and waste treatment plants, leading to health hazards and environmental disaster.
The entire response from the city is full of dystopian lines that turn darkly comedic, as they grapple with the absurdity of being forced into this situation by the President they elected. You can feel the disbelief in their words; the insistence that surely at some point an adult is going to look at all of this and see that it simply can’t work. But instead you get lines like this: “Plans provided by DHS indicate the potential for on-site wastewater treatment; however, what remains notably unclear is where the resulting liquid effluent would actually be discharged. Where exactly is this effluent intended to go, given that the City’s existing wastewater treatment plant is already operating at capacity and is strained to manage current demand, let alone accept additional waste from a facility of this scale? In addition, this raises concerns regarding potential impacts to local wetlands depending on the final disposal location.”
So yeah, the city of Social Circle is worried that ICE is going to start pumping raw sewage all over the place, including into the local wetlands, because no one at DHS bothered to do their jobs and confirm whether the existing water systems could be made to work with their mega concentration camp. Meanwhile, their congressional representative, Mike Collins, said that he “shares the concerns” of the residents, but wouldn’t lift a finger to help any of them because he’s instead “aligned with President Trump.” If Trump says to fill a small Georgia city with sewage, that’s just what he’s going to do. Collins has also claimed that DHS was working with Social Circle to “alleviate their concerns,” despite the city clearly stating that DHS is ignoring basic facts like how much water the city is legally allowed to draw from local sources.
As was the case when I wrote about this before, literally the only people in power attempting to help Social Circle’s residents are instead the state’s Democratic senators, with Sen. Raphael Warnock actually traveling there next week to meet with city officials and discuss ways they can oppose the ICE facility’s construction.
Again, we’re talking about a city that voted 73% for Donald Trump in the 2024 election, and both their chosen President and congressional representative are ignoring their pleas as they prepare to flood Social Circle with sewage and human waste, and only Democrats volunteer to help.
The actual residents of this place, and its local elected leaders, could not be more clear about the fact that the city is not only (ironically) repulsed by the idea of having the detention center there, but that it will be logistically impossible. Their statement also makes it clear that in response to their pleas, they’re just being told to kick rocks. DHS won’t even provide funding to help make local upgrades.
“Supplying that volume [of fresh water] would require substantial infrastructure expansion, new permitting, and significant investment that does not currently exist,” concludes the city in its statement. “When City officials asked whether DHS would provide financial assistance for such upgrades, representatives did not have an immediate answer and instead suggested hypothetical alternatives, such as drilling a well on the property or transporting water from off-site sources. 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.”
I guess we’ll see you back here in a few months, when the “Georgia city is full of sewage” headlines begin bubbling up.