Four men held at the Folkston ICE Processing Center in rural Georgia used the facility's video conferencing software to record a five-minute video describing conditions inside and criticizing President Donald Trump's handling of the immigration courts. The men, asylum seekers from several different countries, said the legal system is intentionally dysfunctional and keeps people in federal custody for months or years at privately owned facilities that profit from their confinement.
Idris Makhmudov, one of the men in the video, said he has been detained at Folkston for 27 months. He said detainees in the facility's work program are paid $1 a day, enough for a 10-minute phone call. The men appear in facility-issued uniforms, and their images are blurred by the low-resolution cameras on the detention center's tablets.
Samantha Hamilton, an Atlanta-based immigration attorney with Asian Americans Advancing Justice and a member of the Shut Down Folkston campaign, said she received a YouTube link to the video through a Signal chat. She said everyone in the video has been placed in segregation and is facing retaliation they expected. Since the video's release, 45 detainees have written an open letter detailing conditions at Folkston, and an estimated 73 detainees are on a hunger strike.
Hamilton said each pod of 60 to 70 detainees has access to only three or four tablets, the sole connection to the outside world. Detainees use GettingOut, a proprietary software owned by the prison communications company Telmate, to send messages, share photos, and make phone or video calls. Telmate was ordered to pay $4.23 million to settle a lawsuit over a 2020 data breach. Telmate is owned by ViaPath Technologies, formerly GlobalTel*Link, which is owned by the New York City private equity firm American Securities. The FCC capped inmate and detainee calling rates at 11 to 25 cents per minute in 2024, then voted in 2025 to raise the cap by up to 83 percent.
Folkston is owned and operated by GEO Group, a publicly traded company whose stock rose more than 75 percent after election day 2024. GEO contributed $1.4 million to Trump's super PAC in July and received $165 million in government contracts earlier this year. The company receives more than $1.5 million a month to run Folkston, which has a capacity of 780 and a guaranteed minimum occupancy of 544.
The men in the video said the only ways out are parole, bond, asylum, or deportation, with deportation now the likeliest outcome. Federal data analyzed by Syracuse University researchers shows that of 143,729 detained cases logged into Georgia immigration courts over the past year, 81 percent involved people without legal representation. Immigration judges in Atlanta have denied 89 percent of the 2,072 asylum cases decided this fiscal year, compared with 63 percent in 2023. Since Trump returned to office, the Department of Justice has fired over 100 judges and hired at least 153 new ones. Hamilton said the Shut Down Folkston coalition regularly receives reports of nearly inedible food and filthy water, including worms found in the water, and that clients have been released with diabetes and high blood pressure.
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