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.
A high-paying job in a place with few other opportunities
On a Thursday morning in mid-September, the Charlton County Hall parking lot and the surrounding grassy fields are full of trucks which likely belong to people attending a GEO Group recruitment and training session across the street, says county administrator Glenn Hull.
"Our motive is about economic development," says Hull. "We don't want to just settle for what we have with our two major revenue sources being the landfill and this detention facility, we want more."
But over the last few years the county has had less. It has lost jobs in the timber and titanium mining industries that once sustained the economy here. So expanding the detention center is a big opportunity for the region.
Once fully expanded, the processing center is projected to bring an additional 400 jobs to the area – not just guards, but nurses, administrators, and other positions that offer health insurance and hourly rates ranging from $17 to $60, higher than most fast food and retail job salaries.
Hull says the county will make about $230,000 this year from the contract between The GEO Group and the federal government; enough to pay the salaries of 20% of the county's employees.
Hull says The GEO Group has been a "great partner," providing about a dozen college scholarships and funding for holiday festivals and events, even as he acknowledges the ethical and moral costs of profiting from people being forcefully separated from their loved ones, locked away and deported.
"I hate to say it, but if not here, then somewhere else," Hull admits. "So you take advantage of what you have on your table. I hate to simplify it like that, 'cause these are lives and families, but that's the reality of it."
Locking people up for money
The ICE facility in Folkston recently made international headlines after hundreds of South Korean workers at a Hyundai battery plant near Savannah, Ga., were held there before deportation.
They described uncomfortably cold temperatures, moldy mattresses, foul smelling drinking water, and racist gestures from staff at the facility.
The GEO Group and the Department of Homeland Security declined NPR's request to tour the facility or to answer detailed questions about the allegations. GEO Group told the Georgia-based news outlet The Current in July that it was in "strict compliance with ICE detention standards."
ICE's Office of Detention Oversight gave the facility a rating of "good" during an inspection in January, and it has earned high marks ever since the agency revised its ratings system in 2022.
But prior to the change, the Folkston facility was repeatedly marked "delinquent" on dozens of ICE detention standards, and in 2022, just months before the facility was rated "superior," a report to Congress by the DHS inspector general documented health and safety violations including unsanitary conditions and lack of medical care.
Samantha Hamilton says she hears similar things from her clients detained inside, who include an elderly man from Jamaica who shattered his hip trying to exit a transport van shackled and was denied hip replacement surgery. The Atlanta-based immigration attorney works with Shut Down Folkston, a campaign to stop the facility's expansion.
"It would increase the number of people who would be at a high risk of experiencing some of these same human rights abuses that are already happening in the facility," she says. "But as we know, once space is created, then they look for people to fill those beds."
Hamilton rejects the argument that the GEO Group is helping the community and bringing jobs to an impoverished area.
"It is endemic to this capitalist system that holds these rural communities hostage to make them feel like there is nothing else they can do but accept this gift, quote unquote, that is presented to them," argues Hamilton.
Planning beyond a 4-year future
Local activist Savannah Pollock has deep roots in Folkston that go back generations; her family owned a big logging company here, and one of her relatives serves on the county board. Still, the 24-year-old medical student Pollock says she didn't really question the ICE facility's dominance in her town until fairly recently.
"One of my issues with it is, when you talk about the detention center now, the first word you're going to get is Folkston, right? The 'Folkston ICE Detention Center', as if that belongs to us, as if that's us," Pollock says. "I don't want to be known for that, because our reputation ain't that."
She understands why jobs and money coming from the facility would be a big deal for her town, because "when you're in a poverty level, you just think about 'how can I get money in my pocket?'"
Even as a past recipient of a college scholarship from The GEO Group , Pollock believes the benefits to the town are overstated.
"GEO's gaining way more out of this than we are," Pollock says, pointing out that many locals struggle to get jobs at the facility due to the credit score and clean criminal record required to work at a federal detention center.
"Morally, I just don't think that's something that as a people we would want to stand behind," she muses. "I say that this is just something you don't want to build your future upon, something that changes every 4 years."
Even Glenn Hull, the county administrator, agrees that it's a bit of a risk to rely on a facility that relies on President Trump's political agenda, but he hopes that it will put Folkston on the map for more federal projects.
"I won't put it in the words of quid pro quo, but we are supporting a major federal policy with this administration, and we need a hospital," Hull says. The county's lone hospital closed suddenly in 2013, leaving behind a blighted building, a medical desert, and 300 people out of work.
At the same time, Hull worries about running out the clock on federal help.
"I'm hopeful that the prison will work itself out of a job if this is the truth that we close our borders and deport all the illegal immigrants," Hull says. "But that would be less jobs for the county."
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