After months of tension between the city of Social Circle and the federal government, the city announced in a press release Thursday that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security will abandon its plan to convert an industrial warehouse into a 10,000-bed immigration detention center in the rural community.
The department’s apparent decision to discontinue the detention center’s development comes a month after the city of Social Circle, which is about an hour east of Atlanta, filed a lawsuit against DHS, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin and then-acting ICE Director Todd Lyons. According to the complaint, lawyers representing Social Circle called on the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Georgia to halt further action on the detention center construction, citing city infrastructure concerns.
The city attributed the information about the stalled project to “multiple sources within DHS,” which was then confirmed by U.S. Rep. Mike Collins, in their Thursday press release.
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