The city of Social Circle has filed a lawsuit against U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin and ICE Director Todd Lyons in connection with federal plans to establish an immigration detention center at a warehouse in the city.

The lawsuit seeks to set aside the federal government’s recent purchase, for nearly $130 million, of the 1-million square-foot warehouse at the intersection of Social Circle Parkway and East Hightower Trail for conversion into an immigrant detention facility that could house as many as 10,000 people awaiting deportation and employ as many as 2,500 personnel.

Beyond seeking to set aside the purchase, the lawsuit seeks to halt the government’s efforts to convert the warehouse into a detention center.

Bluntly, the lawsuit states the warehouse “… is not currently designed to house, feed, bathe, protect, or provide adequate care to anyone, let alone 10,000 people detained by ICE, plus an additional 2,500 workers employed at the facility.”

Throughout its 32 pages, the lawsuit notes that such a facility would be beyond the limits of the city’s infrastructure to support. As just one example, the lawsuit notes the detention center would “… impose an additional estimated 1.113 million gallons per day of water demand on a system with insufficient capacity for that additional demand.”

The lawsuit goes on to contend the detention center “… would likely increase the wastewater output to over one million gallons per day. Such an expanded, unplanned, and ongoing wastewater discharge poses a serious risk of … causing sewer main backups, overflows at the municipal wastewater plant and pump stations, and contamination of groundwater and local waterways.”

The filing also references potential threats to public health and public safety posed by the detention center, particularly noting the city’s limited law enforcement resources, with just 15 officers assigned to patrol shifts, and what the filing calls the city’s “modest EMS (emergency medical service) capacity.”

The city’s filing, made Wednesday in the Athens division of the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Georgia, also seeks to have the defendants’ actions declared to be in violation of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), the federal Administrative Procedure Act (APA), and provisions of Georgia law.

The lawsuit is particularly critical of the secrecy with which development of the local detention center plan has been conducted, contending DHS and ICE “… have primarily operated behind closed doors, and Social Circle has been forced to piece together factual developments largely from public reporting and other limited documentation.”

The lawsuit also takes aim at the $45 billion in federal funding allocated to nationwide detention center development, noting that “(n)othing in this appropriation purports to excuse Defendants from complying with NEPA, the APA, or state law.” More broadly, the 32-page filing contends, among its numerous concerns, that DHS and ICE “are not above the law.”

More specifically, the lawsuit contends DHS and ICE failed to conduct a federally required analysis of the effects the detention facility on the community. Instead of conducting an analysis, the lawsuit contends, DHS and ICE instead went “… charging ahead without input from Social Circle’s town officials or regard for the significant problems … (the) facility would cause.”    

In the wake of Mullins’ recent confirmation as the new head of DHS, activities surrounding the Social Circle warehouse, and similar planned facilities across the country, have been put on hold for further review.

The lawsuit makes arguments that the city has been making almost since officials learned of the plan in late December, as they have tried, with only limited success, to get federal and state elected officials and others to address the problems posed by the planned detention center, which would effectively triple the town’s population of just over 5,000 people.

“Among other harms, Defendants’ plans to imprison up to 10,000 people in a commercial warehouse would overwhelm Social Circle’s fresh water supply and sewage treatment capabilities – resulting in dry taps and raw human waste spills,” the filing notes. That circumstance, the lawsuit contends, means that the agency’s detention center plans “… fall far short of the requirements of the National Environmental Policy Act (‘NEPA’) and the Administrative Procedure Act (‘APA’) and would create a public nuisance under Georgia state law.”

Later, the lawsuit contends that if the federal government is allowed to proceed with plans for the detention center, it “will cause immense and irreparable harm to Social Circle and its residents.”

From there, the city’s lawsuit goes into detail regarding how NEPA and the APA are supposed to work, and notes that both DHS and ICE have, in the past, conducted environmental impact reviews for projects. The filing also references prior court cases, including a 2008 case in which a federal district court held that, under terms of the APA, “an agency is required to consider responsible alternatives to its chosen policy and to give a reasoned explanation for its rejection of such alternatives.”

Turning to state law, Social Circle’s legal action against DHS and ICE and the two named federal officials argues that state law allows municipalities to “block actions that would create public nuisances in their communities.” That section of the lawsuit goes on to note that a defendant in such actions is “… liable for creating a public nuisance where it controls the cause of the harm creating the nuisance.” Under Georgia law, the filing notes, a nuisance is defined as “anything that causes hurt, inconvenience, or damage to another.”

According to the federal filing, Social Circle’s lawsuit was submitted to the Middle District court under the auspices of Keker, Van Nest & Peters, a San Francisco-based boutique law firm that advertises itself as “taking the tough cases.”

Plans for the detention center have drawn considerable opposition, notably from progressive groups across northern Georgia.

Reacting Thursday to news of the city’s lawsuit, Gareth Fenley of Indivisible Boldly Blue, a progressive activist group in Walton County, said, “I’m thrilled. I think that’s wonderful. I totally stand in solidarity with them (the city) and I’m pleased to see it (the lawsuit) going forward.”

Then, pointing to a recent statement from Mullin during a confirmation hearing on his appointment as director of DHS, in which he said the agency would listen to community concerns where detention centers are planned, Fenley said, “We hope they (federal officials) are basically going to decide they now have some surplus federal government property.”

The lawsuit was filed on the same day The Wall Street Journal reported the DHS inspector general, an independent auditor within the agency, was looking into the overall plan to establish detention centers in warehouses across the country. The $38 billion initiative was championed by former DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, who was fired recently by President Donald Trump.