Trump Voters Love ICE, Until It’s in Their Backyard

Cheering on the faceless, masked goons of United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) as they brutalize both migrants and American citizens—from the comfort of one’s own home—offers an undeniable shield of protection for the MAGA voter’s conscience. ICE is only rounding up criminals, they can tell themselves. The “worst of the worst,” as Department of Homeland Security press releases endorsed by renowned liar Tricia McLaughlin are fond of putting it. American citizens who are threatened, assaulted, or even killed on the streets by fanatical agents of ICE or Border Control? Regrettable, but that’s what you get for stepping into the furrowed eyeline of a barely trained federal agent in the zealous pursuit of their duties. It can all be excused, if it’s happening at a great enough distance. But the moment that ICE brings its violence to their own neighborhoods, oh, then it becomes a critical problem. Proud Trump voters in states like Georgia and Idaho have recently become aware of a new truth: They don’t want the thing they say they strongly support to be anywhere near them. They’re terrified of being forced to look at what they voted for.

This reality has been especially and karmically dire for the small Georgia city of Social Circle, less than an hour’s drive east of Atlanta, where residents only recently learned that DHS intends to inhabit a sprawling, newly constructed 1.2 million-square-foot warehouse that will be used as an immigrant detention facility designed to fit up to 10,000 people. Construction of said warehouse had been approved in the thought that it would eventually be used for Amazon packages or car parts, providing tax revenue for the small city of roughly 5,000 residents. Instead, ICE will use it to store people instead, in a system that is resulting in historic levels of detainee deaths. And oh, the tax-exempt federal building won’t even bring any revenue to Social Circle, either. Can you believe that the Trump voters are unhappy about the prospect of tripling the town’s population overnight with federal detainees, with no benefit for themselves?

“Are they gonna put a 16-foot barbed wire fence up that the kids have to see every day?” asked an unnamed Social Circle mother who spoke to the Atlanta-based Georgia Public Broadcasting, wanting to avoid community blowback by remaining anonymous, who also said she was already tired of hearing “I told you so” comments. “‘You guys voted for this.’ No, the detention center next to my child’s school was not on my ballot. That wasn’t what I voted for.”

But of course it is precisely what this woman voted for, and she was joined by 73% of the Social Circle electorate that also voted for Donald Trump in the 2024 election. They voted for a campaign of mass deportation and incarceration while telling themselves that they wouldn’t have to physically be in the presence of any of it; that the reflected suffering wouldn’t come anywhere near their homes or their children. And now, DHS is going to stick 10,000 of those prisoners right across the street from the local Social Circle elementary school, while ignoring the concerns and pleas of the same voters who empowered them to do so.

Unlike other towns that have effectively managed to protest their way out of having local warehouses acquired to create new detention centers, including one in my own backyard, the deal is already done, as DHS has paid $129 million for the site. Curiously, this is far more than the site’s previous valuation, which was valued just last year at less than $30 million for Russian-backed owners PNK Group. Not bad for those Russians, at a tidy $100 million mark-up. DHS has yet to make any public statement in response to questions from administrators or media, acknowledge the protestations of the town, or even explain how tripling the local population is supposed to work when the town is already near the maximum amount of water it can legally draw from local sources.

“I’m concerned about our water and sewer infrastructure,” said Social Circle City Manager Eric Taylor. “We don’t have it. I’ve been trying to tell people, but nobody’s listening.”

Yep. If they try to pack in thousands of people in one “industrial” setting … that’s what they are going to be … concentration camps.

[image or embed]

— Murshed Zaheed (@murshedz.bsky.social) Feb 13, 2026 at 1:15 PM

Social Circle, according to Taylor, is permitted to draw less than a million gallons per day from the local river water source, a level that the town on its own nearly reaches each summer. The government plans to add three times as many people to that equation, to a building “not built for human habitation.” As Taylor observes, “there’s nothing more than a shell of a building.”

And yet, no one from DHS will deign to speak to any of the local administrators and legislators from Social Circle. The local government, in fact, didn’t learn anything about the project until the DHS purchase was reported in the media. Since then, DHS officials have refused to sit down with anyone from Social Circle to even hear them out. Last week, city administrators say a Thursday meeting with a DHS official was scheduled, and that person then simply failed to show up for the meeting, leaving them in the lurch. The project continues to barrel ahead, and the residents are seemingly helpless.

But they’re obviously not the only Trump voters going through this exact same process of learning just how little the federal apparatus they voted for cares about their communities. Only 45 miles to the north of Social Circle, on the northern edges of the Atlanta urban sprawl, the town of Oakwood learned at the same time of another local warehouse that DHS intends to house another 1,500 detainees. Like Social Circle, town officials weren’t informed of anything; they just woke up one morning to news reports. The city, which also voted heavily for Trump, even put out a statement expressing their support for “ICE’s mission of apprehending and detaining individuals with criminal records,” while simultaneously begging ICE not to put a prison camp in their community. “It feels like we were blindsided and that we’ve been steamrolled over,” complained City Manager B.R. White.

In Idaho, meanwhile, the small community of Wilder, home to only 1,725 people, was rocked this fall when a federal raid complete with FBI and helicopter support descended on it, targeting the local Latino community who are critical workers for the area’s farm-based economy. In only a few hours, 100 people were detained; at least 75 have subsequently been deported. The area, which voted more than 90% for Donald Trump, was effectively stripped of its primary farm labor force overnight. The ACLU is now suing on behalf of those people.

“We rely on Hispanic labor,” said second-generation farmer Chris Gross, who grows corn and mint in a the town. “Nobody thought something like this could happen here.”

BREAKING: We’re suing the Trump administration and an Idaho Police Task Force for an unlawful immigration raid at a family event in Wilder, Idaho.

Masked agents zip-tied people at gunpoint, used flash-bang grenades, shot rubber bullets, and detained over 400 people, including children and citizens.

— ACLU (@aclu.org) Feb 10, 2026 at 4:10 PM

And that’s just it, in a nutshell. People don’t mind the idea of violent, wanton application of government muscle, when it doesn’t affect their community directly. Force them to be in proximity to it, and everybody suddenly becomes a NIMBY. No one wants their kids to go to school next to an imposing warehouse stuffed to the gills with human suffering, where detainees are occasionally choked to death. Stuff like that is supposed to happen at least two towns over. Maybe three.

But surely for the residents of a city like Social Circle, Georgia, their elected GOP officials will come to their rescue, right? They’ll stand up to DHS for their constituents, yeah? Well, not so much. Social Circle’s district is represented by Rep. Mike Collins, who is currently in the process of running for the U.S. Senate against incumbent Jon Ossoff. Contacted by Georgia Public Broadcasting, Collins said he agreed with residents that the detention center was a “bad fit” for the town, but then instantly flipped and said he wouldn’t actually do anything about it. Fuck you, constituents! Who cares if you won’t have any water because a 10,000-bed detention facility will be taking it all? Hopefully I’ll be a Senator by then!

“I fully support ICE, 100%,” said Collins to reporters. “I think that as long as DHS comes in there and sits down and says, ‘This is what we found, this is how we’re going to operate this,’ and takes care of any of the concerns for the local officials there to make sure that they don’t impact them negatively, then they’ll be able to operate that facility.”

And if they don’t “take care of the concerns” of the locals, what then? I can only assume Collins would reply, “Please don’t ask me that.”

Ironically, the only ones actually attempting to take concrete steps for the benefit of Social Circle, Ga., residents are the state’s two Democratic Senators, both of whom the residents of Social Circle would no doubt vote against in a heartbeat. Sen. Jon Ossoff wrote a letter to DHS and Kristi Noem, unequivocally objecting to the facility and supporting the city’s right to be informed. Sen. Raphael Warnock went further, inserting language into a prospective funding bill for the currently shut down Department of Homeland Security, that would directly block DHS from putting a detention facility in the site by blocking funding for that purpose. Even when it’s constituents who despise them, at least the Democratic members of Congress in this story are trying to help.

Senator Warnock’s amendment would prohibit the use of federal funds for the “acquisition, construction, renovation, or expansion” of immigrant detention facilities in the Georgia towns of Social Circle and Oakwood.

[image or embed]

— Necessary Trouble GA (@necessarytroublega.bsky.social) Feb 15, 2026 at 11:05 AM

What strange bedfellows, eh? A small city votes overwhelming for Trump to brutalize immigrants. Trump’s DHS chooses that small city as a site for brutalizing immigrants. The city’s residents object to the proximity and are ignored by DHS despite their votes putting this iteration of the Department of Homeland Security into power. Their Congressional representative takes the side of DHS against his own voter base, and the only ones who volunteer to assist are the hated Democratic Senators on the other side of the aisle. I can only assume that any moment now, we’ll be hearing about how this is actually Joe Biden’s fault.

Two thirds of Americans are now of the opinion that ICE has gone too far, which is no small thing in a setting as rigid in its partisan lockstep as the one we’re in now. It’s a change of perception that can only occur because of stories like this one, which are both ironic and unfortunate for everyone involved—particularly, lest we forget, the thousands of immigrants who will be brutally housed in such a facility. The American residents in small towns in Georgia and Idaho cannot help but reap what they’ve sown. Here’s hoping that the experience convinces them to sow differently.