Matéo Penado stands across from a warehouse recently purchased by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Flowery Branch, Ga., on March 12. Mr. Penado chairs a social justice group called The Rainbow Collective that has held protests against the planned jail.Kendrick Brinson/The Globe and Mail
Along a secondary highway that winds through Hall County, Ga., Mexican supermarkets stand next to Salvadoran bakeries and Dominican barbershops. Since the 1990s, immigrants from Latin America have been drawn to this semirural corner of the state, some 70 kilometres northeast of Atlanta, by plentiful jobs in its poultry plants. Many have put down roots, imparting an international flare to a place of pine forests, lakes and gently rolling hills.
Now, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has chosen this strip as the site of a future jail. Last month, the agency quietly bought two cavernous warehouses with plans to convert them into a processing centre that could hold as many as 1,600 detainees at a time. It’s part of a plan to build a network of 34 ICE detention facilities across the country to help ramp up President Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign.
The move has sparked fierce resistance amid fears that the immigration crackdown will soon arrive in Hall County, replete with the large-scale roundups and racial profiling that have been its hallmarks elsewhere in the country.
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Local officials, meanwhile, say ICE has refused to talk to them, even as the new jail threatens to overload the area’s sewage system and force residents to pick up the tab. They are mulling suing the Trump administration in a bid to get a court injunction against the project.
It has all turned this community into an unlikely flashpoint in the war over Mr. Trump’s signature domestic policy.
“It was upsetting but it also made a lot of people furious, because how can that be built here?” said Matéo Penado as he sat in a Salvadoran restaurant across the street from the warehouses one recent afternoon. “If it weren’t for Hispanics and immigrants working, Hall County wouldn’t be running, frankly. It’s the essence of this community.”
The Rainbow Collective, a local social justice group that Mr. Penado chairs, has held protests against the planned jail.
Ronaldo Perez, 26, practises soccer in front of his home on March 12. He lives directly next to the new ICE warehouses.Kendrick Brinson/The Globe and Mail
Mr. Penado, a 25-year-old who works as an immigration paralegal, was born and raised in Hall County. His mother escaped poverty in Matamoros, Mexico, and his father fled civil war in El Salvador to settle here. His father, uncles and aunts all found work in the poultry plants of Gainesville, the county seat, which bills itself as “the poultry capital of the world.”
Growing up, Mr. Penado often worried that his parents, who had not yet received green cards, would be stopped by immigration authorities one day and never come home. When he was in high school, during the first Trump administration, many of his classmates, who had been brought undocumented to the country as children, worried that they would be stripped of their Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals legal status and deported.
“It’s not a way to live, being constantly in fear, living in the shadows,” Mr. Penado said. “I’m not going to allow something to happen to a family member, to a friend, to someone in the community.”
On top of the humanitarian question, the authorities here are struggling with financial ones. Almost a third of the county’s 222,000 residents are Latino. Mass detentions could cause labour shortages and force businesses to shut down, decimating the economy.
“We hope there’s not a wholesale roundup just because somebody’s skin is different. To me, that’s just so wrong,” said B.R. White, the city manager of Oakwood, a town of 7,000 people at the south end of the county, where the jail would be located. “The Latino community here provides a lot of labour in the workforce, they rent a lot of properties. If you start having people leave, how do you make up that void?”
No one from ICE or the Department of Homeland Security, the agency’s parent, told the town about the planned jail, Mr. White said. It only came to light when federal government documents were leaked to the media revealing a plan to buy warehouses across the country and turn them into immigration detention facilities.
Since then, Mr. White has tried contacting the federal government directly, as well as through the offices of Georgia’s senators and representatives, but no one has been willing to speak with him.
One of the new ICE warehouses. Local officials say ICE has refused to talk to them.Kendrick Brinson/The Globe and Mail
When exactly the jail will open remains unclear. One recent cold, sunny afternoon, there was no activity at the site, save for a black SUV patrolling the perimeter. The buildings – three storeys tall and covering a combined 51,000 square metres, about the size of seven soccer pitches – dominate the surrounding landscape.
Property records show that DHS bought the newly built warehouses in Hall County for US$68-million last month. Because the government is exempt from paying property taxes, Mr. White estimates the sale will cost the town and county a combined US$771,000 in lost annual revenue.
Using the warehouses as jails would also require at least 180,000 gallons of water per day, many times more than the maximum of 6,800 they were designed for, Mr. White said. This would require Oakwood taxpayers to make a payment of at least US$2.7-million to Gainesville, which processes the town’s wastewater, to buy additional capacity.
The town council has passed two resolutions demanding that ICE stop the project.
Now, there is talk of asking the courts to stop the facility. “We’re looking at legal processes that we could use,” said Mr. White, 63, as he sat in his office in the town hall. “Nothing’s off the table.”
In his 37 years in local government, he said, he has never encountered a similar situation. “It’s been frustrating. It’s the first time I’ve run across any federal agency that just won’t talk.”
ICE has shared some details of its plans for Hall County, albeit indirectly, via a briefing to the office of Andrew Clyde, the congressman for the area, and a memo on its “Detention Reengineering Initiative” provided to Social Circle, another Georgia town slated to house a new immigration jail.
The agency’s plan is to build eight “large-scale” detention centres across the U.S., with 16 processing sites feeding into them. It will also buy 10 existing facilities where ICE already rents space. The warehouses in Hall County would become one of the processing sites, with between 1,400 to 1,600 people staying up to a week before being moved to a “mega-center” in Social Circle, which would house 8,500 detainees at a time.
Social Circle is also taking action against ICE, locking down the building’s water supply to stop the jail from going forward. Senator Raphael Warnock, for his part, is trying to block both the Social Circle and Oakwood jails in an amendment to a DHS funding bill currently before Congress.
The amount of pushback the Trump administration has run into is somewhat incongruous in typically conservative rural Georgia. Hall has supported the Republican candidate for president in every election since 1984, giving Mr. Trump more than 70 per cent of the vote in all three of his runs.
The Salvadoran restaurant Pupuseria El Guanaco is across the street from the ICE warehouses in Hall County. Almost a third of the county’s 222,000 residents are Latino.Kendrick Brinson/The Globe and Mail
At a clothing store selling Latin American soccer jerseys in Gainesville, Brenda Sandoval said she was excited when Mr. Trump returned to office last year.
“I was very happy that he had won because he is very good when it comes to economics,” she said. “But unfortunately, he has now gone against everything to do with Hispanic people.”
Ms. Sandoval, 52, who has lived in Hall County for 25 years since immigrating from Honduras, said she knows people who have been arrested by ICE. Business at the store has also dropped off as people stay home to avoid being stopped by agents. She estimated that she had lost about 300 people from her usual customer base.
If this goes on, she said, the economic consequences will be dire. “The town would sink. Goodbye, business.”
It’s a similar story for Kenia Martínez, 47, at a nearby Latin American food store, where she said sales have dropped about 40 per cent this past year. “People say they are going to move because the area no longer looks safe,” she said. “You don’t know from one day to another whether ICE will grab you.”
Gabriel Torres, who works at a taqueria, said he is now cautious when he goes out, taking his identification with him at all times.
“It affects us all, the entire Hispanic community,” said Mr. Torres, 27, who immigrated eight years ago from Mexico. “Including those who have papers, because they are known to target people because of their skin colour, if they look Hispanic.”