Folkston at center of ICE’s expansion plans

Alligator Alcatraz, the hastily built Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention center in the middle of the Florida Everglades, has been used for a lot of photo ops. But a few miles east of the Okefenokee Swamp, in the South Georgia town of Folkston, plans are moving forward for what will be the largest detention center in the country.

Back in early June, there was a brief hitch in the plan to combine the existing Folkston ICE detention center with an adjacent and vacant private prison, the D. Ray James Correctional Facility, creating a nearly 3,000-bed facility. The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) flagged for review the $48 million contract for the expansion. DOGE is required to review all Department of Homeland Security contracts over $20 million, so there was nothing surprising about the delay, but it drew some notice in the press.

And then presto — within a day or so, U.S. Rep. Buddy Carter’s office announced that he had “landed a lucrative… contract,” for the expansion, which was on again with no more mention of DOGE. Carter, who is seeking the Republican nomination to oppose U.S. Sen. John Ossoff, has been an active promoter of the enlarged facility, which he says will bring some 400 jobs to his district.

A big winner in this expedited project is the GEO Group, the nation’s largest operator of private prisons, which owns and operates both the facilities that are being combined in Folkston. Before he was designated “border czar” by President Donald Trump, Tom Homan was a paid consultant to the GEO Group.

According to a report in The Current, ICE looked past numerous findings of deficiencies and violations at the Folkston Detention Center to approve the expansion.

The staggering increase in funding for ICE didn’t get as much attention as it should have before the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Just for building new detention centers alone, the appropriation is $45 billion, an amount considerably larger than the budget of the entire federal prison system.

The Folkston expansion has gotten a green light because it would be an essential node in the immigration detention infrastructure, as it is sometimes called online, processing detainees from across the Southeast in a much larger process of rounding up, imprisoning and deporting immigrants not legally in this country.

Meanwhile, if Gallup is to be believed, public sentiment for such a dramatically expanded campaign has undergone a dramatic reversal.

In 2024, the Gallup Poll showed 55 percent of Americans wanted immigration reduced. In polling last month, that number dropped to 30 percent. In some ways, the administration has been a victim of its own success because the sharp drop in illegal border crossings has reduced worries about immigration generally.

But the polling also seems to indicate an overall rejection of the current hardline crackdown. Overall, 79 percent of those polled said immigration was a good thing for the country. Last year, 88 percent of the Republicans polled said the current level of immigration should be decreased. In the most recent polling, that dropped to 47 percent.

Polls like this one won’t have any impact on voters for whom immigration is a defining issue. But this poll does show a significant change in whatever the middle is on this issue. The tactics that were intended to scare illegal immigrants into leaving appear to have scared the permanent residents also.

It needs to be said again that the money appropriated for ICE envisions an enormous increase in the activities that have made a lot of voters, including Republicans, nervous.

It will be interesting, by the way, to see how much of that ICE money goes to the private prison industry, which appears to have found a lifeline in the immigration crackdown.