LISTEN: U.S. Sen. Raphael Warnock met with city leaders on Monday in Social Circle to hear the city's concern about a planned ICE detention center there — and see the aging infrastructure that cannot handle the extra load to keep drinking water safe. GPB’s Grant Blankenship has more.
When Democratic U.S. Sen. Raphael Warnock toured the water infrastructure of the city of Social Circle on Monday, he heard about how the water works can only replace the filtration system in its half-a-century-old plant about half as often as it should and how the wastewater plant is already at its limit.
It's part of the city of 5,000's struggle to figure out how it can accommodate up to 10,000 Immigration and Customs Enforcement detainees in a warehouse in town recently bought by the federal government.
Warnock placed the blame for the struggle on President Trump’s shifting priorities amid the ongoing immigration crackdown.
“If this president focused on removing violent criminals — as he promised — Social Circle wouldn't be suffering the consequences of this administration's out-of-control immigration policy,” Warnock said.
Social Circle has been trying to get answers from the Department of Homeland Security about that plan since the news of it broke near the end of 2025. Since then, city leaders have had one conversation with DHS, during which they say all their objections and concerns went unheard — concerns they were now eager to explain to Warnock.
Warnock’s tour started at the Social Circle water treatment plant on the Alcovy River. There he was led past the white block pumphouse at the river’s edge, where escaping water could be seen dripping from rusting pipes that run to the filtration system up the hill.
There, Social Circle City Manager Eric Taylor explained the simple math: Georgia’s Environmental Protection Division only lets the city pull 1 million gallons from the river a day. And even if the city could pull what ICE says it wants — four times that — this facility couldn’t make it all safe to drink.
“That’s what’s shocking for me, is that Homeland Security engineers would come to some kind of conclusion that we have enough,” Taylor told Warnock. “That this works. And we've never met any of them.”
At the wastewater treatment plant, the situation was similar.
“The treatability is the issue, you know,” said wastewater superintendent Jay Link. “You got several different issues that you're concerned with. The amount of flow is the biggest issue.”
Link said he didn’t know anything about a DHS plan to build an onsite cistern for sewage, which would hold the sewage back to essentially dose it out to the city system so as not to overwhelm it, as described in document shared with the city manager.
Warnock called it bad management that DHS is moving ahead with their plans for the Social Circle detention center over the feedback from locals.
“And so far, the administration has decided that it can somehow figure that out without talking to the people who actually live in the town itself,” Warnock said. "That doesn't make any sense to me."
Warnock said that the current pause in DHS funding presents an opportunity to back off the infusion of cash ICE received with the passage last year of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
“ICE received some $75 billion," Warnock said. "That's a huge slush fund. To bring it into clear focus, with that kind of funding, it's larger than the Marines."
Warnock said he introduced an amendment this week that would defund the Social Circle detention center. He said the amendment should be part of the debate on DHS funding when it resumes.
