South Georgia will soon be home to the largest ICE detention center in the U.S.

WUGA | By Jeff Dantre

Published July 8, 2025 at 5:44 PM EDT

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Officers arrested 271 criminal aliens last week in an enforcement action targeting individuals who pose a threat to public safety and immigration violations. ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) officers made the arrests across the state of Florida, Puerto Rico and the U. S. Virgin Islands.

The AJC reports Charlton County approved a nearly $50 million agreement with ICE in June the expand the Folkston Processing Center from 1,100 detainees to nearly 3,000.

Three years ago, the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General published the results of an unannounced inspection of the Folkston center citing unsanitary and dilapidated facilities, mold growth, water damage, lack of access to hot showers and an absence of hot meals and low staffing.

The facility was eventually cleared and the expansion allowed to move forward. The state’s other facility, the Stewart Detention Center is already the second busiest in the country.

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Jeff Dantre

Jeff has delivered morning news at WUGA Radio for more than a decade. He was among a team at CNN that won a George Foster Peabody Award in 1991 for an educational product based on the fall of the Soviet Union. He also won an Edward R. Murrow Award from Radio Television Digital News Association in 2007 for producing a series for WSB Radio on financial scams. Jeff is a graduate of the Babcock Graduate School of Management at Wake Forest University (MBA) and holds a BS in Business Administration from Campbell University, both in North Carolina.

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