Folkston ICE: Detainees filmed using facility software

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Four detainees at the Folkston ICE Processing Center in rural Georgia repurposed the facility's video conferencing software as a recording camera — providing a rare glimpse behind the walls of a private US immigration detention facility. The Verge reports, citing a five-minute video the men published from inside the facility.

According to The Verge, the focus of the recording is not detention itself, but the functioning of the US immigration courts under President Donald Trump. The four detainees speak, the report says, of a hostile takeover of the courts and a system that deliberately keeps asylum seekers in limbo for months or years. The Verge summarizes the men's accounts as saying they sit in an intentionally dysfunctional process — in privately operated facilities that profit from their incarceration.

How the facility software became a camera

According to The Verge, the Folkston ICE Processing Center uses video conferencing software that detainees are supposed to use for calls with lawyers or family members. Four men used the system to deliver their statements directly to the camera. What was designed as a communication channel became a publishing platform.

Publishing the video cost the men something immediately, writes The Verge: "The video cost the men, literally and figuratively." The report does not specify what concrete consequences they face, whether in the work program or in their proceedings.

Pittance wages in the work program, contract with GEO Group

According to The Verge, the facility has an internal work program: detainees cook, do laundry, or clean for a "Hungerlohn" ("a pittance"). Inside the facility, these earnings are often the only way to afford small things like hygiene products or snacks.

The Folkston ICE Processing Center is operated by the private prison corporation GEO Group, according to GPB and The Current Georgia. After inspections, ICE did find fewer violations than before 2019, but the contract with the company was nevertheless continued. A visit by investigators from the Department of Homeland Security Inspector General in November 2021 likewise did not result in a separation from the operator.

Hunger strike, violence, and further allegations

The video from Folkston is not alone. According to estimates from lawyers cited by The Guardian, at least 73 detained migrants are taking part in a hunger strike at the facility. The Guardian refers to the complex as the "Folkston D Ray James ICE processing center" — the Folkston ICE Processing Center is part of the D. Ray James Detention Complex in southeast Georgia.

From another ICE facility in Georgia, the Stewart Detention Center, Atlanta News First reports — citing family members and lawmakers — that detainees must sleep on the floor, go without food, and use showers as toilets. Conditions have been described as "unjust torture" and "medical neglect."

An analysis by the Washington Post, cited by the Charlotte Observer, has documented according to its own account around 1,460 cases in which guards used force against detainees since January 2024 — most of them in 2025.

What the recording accomplishes — and what it leaves open

The video from Folkston is a first-person testimony from a facility that otherwise reaches the outside mostly through lawsuits from lawyers and reports from family members. It points to structures — a private operator with a long-standing ICE contract, a work program paying minimal wages, an overburdened immigration court system — that have drawn criticism for years regardless of the individual case. What the five-minute recording does not resolve: what has happened to the four men since publication, and whether further material will emerge from inside the facility.