Four men detained at an ICE detention center in rural Georgia used the facility’s video conferencing software to expose both the conditions inside and President Donald Trump’s hostile takeover of the immigration courts. In the five-minute video, the men describe an intentionally dysfunctional legal system designed to keep them trapped in federal custody for months or years — in privately owned facilities that profit from their confinement.
The video cost the men, literally and figuratively. The Folkston ICE Processing Center has a work program for detainees in which they are paid a pittance to cook, do laundry, or clean. These wages allow them to buy supplementary food in Folkston’s commissary and stay connected to people outside. “The workers here are paid $1 a day, which is just enough for a 10-minute phone call,” said Idris Makhmudov, one of the men in the video, who says he has been detained in Folkston for 27 months and counting.
Makhmudov and the three other men, who are from several different countries, appear in drab, facility-issued uniforms. Their images are blurred by the low-resolution cameras on the detention center’s tablets. It’s unclear exactly how the men made the video, but it’s possible that they called someone on the outside who recorded their message to the outside world. Samantha Hamilton, an Atlanta-based immigration attorney with Asian Americans Advancing Justice, said she received a YouTube link to the video via a Signal chat. “We’ve learned that everyone in the video that was released this weekend has been put into segregation,” said Hamilton, a member of the Shut Down Folkston campaign. “They’re facing retaliation, and they were expecting that.” Since then, 45 detainees wrote an open letter further detailing the conditions at Folkston, and an estimated 73 detainees are now on a hunger strike.
ICE detention isn’t supposed to be a form of punishment; its purpose is ostensibly to ensure that people in deportation proceedings show up to their hearings. But ICE facilities are virtually indistinguishable from prisons — a point the men in the video make repeatedly. Folkston, in fact, was a prison before it became an immigrant detention center. It has many of the hallmarks of prison life, including expensive communication tools that detainees are forced to rely on to talk to people on the outside.
“These facilities leave people with very few options to be able to communicate with their loved ones,” said Hamilton, who has had several clients detained at Folkston. She said each “pod” of 60 to 70 detainees has access to just three or four tablets, their only connection to the outside world.
Those communications come at a price. To send messages, share photos, or make phone or video calls to their loved ones, detainees at Folkston have to use GettingOut, a proprietary software owned by the prison communications company Telmate. Earlier this year, Telmate was ordered to pay $4.23 million to settle a lawsuit stemming from a 2020 data breach in which users’ information — including names, payment details, and social security numbers — was accessed.
Telmate is owned by ViaPath Technologies — formerly GlobalTel*Link — which is in turn owned by American Securities, a New York City-based private equity firm. In 2021, ViaPath charged users anywhere between 18 cents to $1.10 per minute, according to data obtained by the Prison Policy Initiative. These fees add up — so much so that in 2024, the Federal Communications Commission capped the rates companies could charge inmates and detainees to 11 to 25 cents per minute depending on the size of the facility. In 2025, after Trump returned to office, the FCC voted to raise the rate cap by up to 83 percent.
Detainees in ICE custody often struggle to get the money they’ve put into these systems back after being released — or, more commonly, deported. GettingOut’s terms of service state that users will lose access to their accounts after 180 days of inactivity, after which they forfeit any money deposited into their accounts. The only way to get their money back is by calling a hard-to-reach customer service line, according to a report by WVTF. Under President Joe Biden, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau ordered Tel*Link to pay $3 million for illegally freezing and draining funds from incarcerated people’s accounts.
Communications are just one way private companies make money from immigrant detention. Folkston is owned and operated by GEO Group, a publicly traded company whose stock price soared after Trump’s reelection, jumping by more than 75 percent after election day 2024. GEO has donated lavishly to Trump’s campaigns and to related political efforts, contributing $1.4 million to Trump’s super PAC in July — perhaps to show its gratitude for the $165 million it received earlier this year in government contracts. The company receives more than $1.5 million a month to run Folkston, according to a 2021 Homeland Security budget overview. The facility, which has a capacity of 780, has a guaranteed minimum occupancy of 544.
Trump’s mass deportation effort, coupled with the backlogged immigration court system, has made it easy for ICE to meet its contractually agreed-upon minimum at Folkston. The men in the video allege that they and others have been there for several years, and explain that the only ways to get out are to be granted parole, bond, or asylum — or to be deported. The latter option is the likeliest now, as Trump has transformed the immigration legal system into what one detainee calls “deportation courts.” Of the 143,729 detained cases logged into Georgia immigration courts over the past year, 81 percent involved people who had no legal representation, and were therefore far less likely to be granted any form of relief, according to federal data analyzed by researchers at Syracuse University. The odds are especially low for asylum seekers. Immigration judges in Atlanta have denied 89 percent of the 2,072 asylum cases decided so far this fiscal year, compared to 63 percent in 2023.
The men in the video note that Trump has overhauled the immigration system to secure favorable rulings. Since Trump’s return to office, the Department of Justice, which oversees the immigration courts, has fired over 100 judges whose decisions don’t align with the administration’s mass deportation push. At least 153 new judges have been hired in their place. These judges are far less likely to release immigrants on bond or parole, keeping them trapped in what detainees and advocates say are substandard conditions.
Hamilton, the immigration attorney, said she and other members of the Shut Down Folkston coalition regularly receive reports of nearly inedible food and filthy water in the facility, including instances where detainees have found worms in the water. Because the food is ultra-processed, she said, many of her clients have gone in healthy and been released with new medical conditions, including diabetes and high blood pressure.
“Most of us are asylum seekers, those who came to the United States seeking protection from political persecution and violence in their home countries,” Makhmudov, one of the men detained at Folkston, says in the video. “Many fled out of fear of becoming political prisoners in those countries — and one might say we became political prisoners in the United States simply because we are immigrants.”