Georgia ICE detainees use facility's video-call software to expose conditions inside
Four men held at the Folkston ICE center in Georgia used the facility's own video software to record a message about conditions and the immigration court system. Their lawyer says they were placed in segregation, and an estimated 73 detainees are now on hunger strike.
Four men held at an ICE detention center in rural Georgia have used the facility's video conferencing software to expose conditions inside and to criticize the immigration courts under President Donald Trump. In a five-minute video, they describe a system that, in their view, is designed to keep people in federal custody for months or years in privately run facilities that profit from their confinement.
The men appear in facility-issued uniforms, and the image is blurred by the low-resolution cameras on the center's tablets. How exactly the video was made is unclear; they may have called someone outside who recorded the message. One of them, Idris Makhmudov, says he has been detained at Folkston for 27 months. He says detainees who cook, do laundry or clean earn $1 a day, enough for a single 10-minute phone call.
Samantha Hamilton, an Atlanta immigration attorney and member of the Shut Down Folkston campaign, says everyone in the video has been put into segregation and faces retaliation. Since then, 45 detainees have signed an open letter about conditions, and an estimated 73 are on hunger strike.
Costly communication
Each pod of 60 to 70 detainees has only three or four tablets. To contact relatives, detainees must use GettingOut, software owned by Telmate, which belongs to ViaPath Technologies and, in turn, the private equity firm American Securities. Earlier this year Telmate was ordered to pay $4.23 million to settle a lawsuit over a 2020 data breach. Under the terms of service, accounts are closed after 180 days of inactivity and any remaining money is forfeited.
Profit from detention
Folkston is run by GEO Group, which receives more than $1.5 million a month for it, according to a 2021 Homeland Security budget overview. The facility holds up to 780 people and has a guaranteed minimum occupancy of 544. Over the past year, 81 percent of detained cases in Georgia immigration courts involved people without legal representation. Atlanta judges denied 89 percent of 2,072 asylum cases decided this fiscal year. The Department of Justice has fired over 100 judges and hired at least 153 new ones.
