Social Circle, a mostly Maga town, builds strange bedfellow coalition against plans to convert warehouse
On a recent morning Eric Taylor, city manager for a small Georgia town of about 5,000 residents called Social Circle, was contacted by a staffer from Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
“They asked me to turn on the water,” he said of a 1m sq ft warehouse nearby that the federal government recently purchased for $128m, with plans to use it for locking up as many as 10,000 detainees as part of the Trump administration’s mass deportation plan.
“I told them I’m not going to do it,” Taylor said. “Not until they come and talk to me.”
The local official, together with the town’s mayor and police chief, have all publicly opposed the Department of Homeland Security’s plans to open what could become one of the largest immigration detention centers in the US – in a rural town with 19th-century buildings downtown, and horse and cattle farms and hay for sale on the outskirts.
