Offers were due on Thursday, November 12, for two huge Georgia warehouses that the federal government bought to turn into immigration detention centres — and then never used. The warehouses, in Social Circle and Oakwood, are being sold by commercial real-estate firm Cushman & Wakefield after the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) scrapped its plan to convert them into detention facilities, CBS News reported.

Source: CBS News via Wisevoter

Neither building ever held a single detainee. The Social Circle property, on Hightower Trail, is a roughly one-million-square-foot warehouse for which the government paid more than $128 million; it was planned to hold up to 10,000 people. The Oakwood complex, a 540,408-square-foot warehouse, was bought for $68.2 million and was planned for up to 1,600 detainees, according to the reporting.

A $38-billion detention plan, paused

The two Georgia sites were part of a much larger federal plan, put at $38 billion, to buy warehouses across the United States and convert them into large-scale detention hubs for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin paused the plan in April, and the Georgia conversions never went ahead. The Government Accountability Office (GAO), the federal watchdog, later reported $20 million in unrecoverable costs on the warehouse purchases — money spent that the government cannot get back even if the buildings sell.

Local officials in both Georgia cities had pushed back against the plans through the year. Their complaints, as reported, were about poor communication from federal officials and about practical limits — above all whether local water and sewer systems could serve facilities of that size. In March, Social Circle officials cut off water to the planned facility site. Oakwood City Manager B.R. White said the first communication his city received from federal officials about the warehouse concerned its sale.

Source: USCT News

Seven warehouses on the market at once

The Georgia pair is not being sold alone. Cushman & Wakefield listed them with five other warehouses ICE bought for the same detention programme, in a portfolio that also includes properties in Salt Lake City, Detroit, El Paso and central Pennsylvania. The sales are a direct test of what the abandoned plan will finally cost: whether sale prices come anywhere near what the government paid is still unknown while bidding is open.

For immigrant communities in Georgia — including the state's growing Punjabi and South Asian communities in the Atlanta suburbs — the episode closes a chapter that began with the prospect of two of the largest detention sites in the country being built in small Georgia cities. Detention in Georgia continues at existing facilities, but the warehouse mega-centres that were announced with such speed will not open in Social Circle or Oakwood.

What happens next is arithmetic and paperwork. Bidding on the Georgia warehouses closed on Thursday, and the sale outcome will begin to become clear from the offers received. Only then will it be possible to measure the final loss against the purchase prices of more than $128 million and $68.2 million, and against the $20 million the GAO already counts as unrecoverable.