Immigrant advocates protest Ga. ICE jail expansion

A crowd of roughly 30 immigrant rights advocates held a rally Thursday across the street from a South Georgia immigrant detention center to protest its planned expansion.

Last month, exclusive AJC reporting revealed that the privately run immigration jail in Folkston, a town of about 4,400 near the Florida-georgia border, is set to nearly quadruple its capacity. With over 3,000 beds, the expanded detention center would be one of the largest of its kind in the nation.

On Thursday, protesters waved signs calling for a stop to the expansion and chanted, in Spanish, “Sin papeles, sin miedo.” “No papers, no fear.” The gathering was part of a national day of action, as immigrant advocates rallied across the country and called attention to what they describe as a lack of achievement from the Biden administration in the immigration space.

“These actions are a channel for advocates to express their deep disappointment over this administration’s broken promises to create immigration relief, stop deportation and to end private detention,” said Jonathan Zuñiga-hernandez with the Georgia Latino Alliance of Human Rights, one of the groups that organized Thursday’s Folkston gathering.

News of the Folkston expansion comes months after the president had stated that “private detention centers should not exist” in remarks deliv- ered in Georgia. Over the course of its first year in office, the Biden administration kept in place some restrictive Trump-era immigration policies, a source of frustration for progressive immigration advocates.

On Thursday, speakers at the rally recognized that local city and county officials in Folkston support the detention’s center expansion because they see the possibility of more local jobs and additional tax revenue. But they said economic development should take a back seat to human rights.