FOLKSTON, Ga. – “Help!” yell the orange-clothed men standing in a yard surrounded by barbed wire, the full glare of the hot Southeast Georgia sun above. “We ain’t being treated good out here!”
“Out here” is the Folkston ICE Processing Center, a sprawling complex of high-security buildings in this rural town near the Florida-Georgia line. A water tower rising from the center advertises The GEO Group, the private prison corporation that runs the facility through a contract with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Over the next two years, GEO Group will receive $96 million from the federal government to expand this former state prison into one of the largest detention centers in the country. Parts of the facility were already housing ICE detainees as a GEO Group-run detention center since 2017, but the expansion will double the current capacity, with room for up to 3,000 beds.
When that happens, detainees will make up more than half of the total population of Folkston, a town where a third of the residents live below the poverty line and the two largest employers are a landfill that accepts toxic coal ash, and the detention center.
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