SOCIAL CIRCLE, Ga. — Thursday is the final day for buyers to bid on two Georgia warehouses the federal government bought this year to hold immigrants and then never used.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement spent more than $128 million on a building of about 1 million square feet in Social Circle, east of Atlanta, with plans to hold as many as 10,000 people. It paid roughly $68 million for a complex of about 600,000 square feet in Oakwood, north of Atlanta, sized for up to 1,600 detainees. Neither was ever converted, and both drew protests from residents and local leaders throughout the year.
A commercial real estate firm has now packaged the pair with five other ICE warehouses from around the country as a single portfolio for sale. Leaders in both cities have said federal officials told them little before the listing. Social Circle’s leadership has welcomed the sale, saying the site could not support a detention center and that the property will return to the local tax rolls.
The Georgia properties were part of a much larger buying spree. Federal auditors at the Government Accountability Office reported in September that ICE bought 11 warehouses for $1.07 billion before the Department of Homeland Security paused the plan under new leadership and moved to sell seven of them.
Auditors said the reversal left about $7.7 million in costs the government cannot get back, including zoning studies and title insurance, and that ICE had spent around $12.8 million on utilities, security and other services at warehouses it plans to sell. The report blamed the losses on the lack of a full strategy for meeting the agency’s goal of detaining up to 100,000 people.
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