Some people come to the outskirts of Lumpkin, Georgia, to see Providence Canyon State Park, known as the state’s “Little Grand Canyon,” where jagged red cliffs cut deep into the earth. Others visit the area to hunt deer or the feral hogs that wreak havoc on local farmland.
But perhaps the biggest reason visitors come to this tiny town of fewer than 900 residents is because someone they know — usually someone they love — is one of thousands of people being held by Immigration and Customs Enforcement at Stewart Detention Center. They make the long trek to Lumpkin from all over the South: two hours from Atlanta; six from Charleston; seven from Memphis.
When visitors arrive after their long journeys, it can be difficult to find even basic necessities. Many downtown Lumpkin businesses are shuttered. Dusty Christmas decorations sit in the windows, even in August. The town doesn’t have any hotels or supermarkets, but you can get snacks from the combination Dollar Tree/Family Dollar or the Dollar General. A restaurant, Ripley’s Eat It or Not, is open a few days a week, with the charmingly honest tagline: “Best burgers in town. Only burgers in town, but still…”
Half a block from the main square stands a two-story white house with forest green shutters called “El Refugio.” Though it looks like any other well-kept private residence, a sign out front welcomes anyone coming to see people detained at Stewart. It offers beds if they are tired and food if they are hungry.
The number of immigrants held in detention across the U.S.has reached its highest level on record. As of November, around 65,000 people were locked up in a network of over 200 private and publicly run facilities. Within this network, Stewart Detention Center holds more people than almost any other facility. Many of the detained immigrants have lived in the U.S. for years or decades, and their absence leaves holes in countless communities. When they’re seized and put into detention, their spouses, children, and parents find themselves having to suddenly figure out a life without them.
In the midst of rising arrests and deportations, El Refugio plays a unique role; its staff believe it is the only hospitality house of its kind — hosting visiting families and sending volunteers to see people whose families cannot come themselves. Operating on a modest budget and run mostly by volunteers, the nonprofit has seen a surge in demand for its services. Last year, they hosted around 800 people at the house. This year, they estimate it will be twice that number.
We — a pair of reporters from The Marshall Project and Latino USA/Futuro Investigates — went to El Refugio over Labor Day weekend to talk to the volunteers doing this work and the people who stopped at the hospitality house, whose name in Spanish means “the refuge.”
Around 8 a.m. on Saturday morning, rain poured, and a wispy fog settled around the house. Inside, it smelled like fresh laundry and coffee as the day’s work began. Five volunteers huddled around a kitchen island, snacking on slices of peach cake and a bag of mandarin oranges. The group of women — Black, Latina and White, ranging from their early 20s to their 60s— had all driven from Atlanta the day before and slept in the upstairs bedrooms.
Marilyn McGinnis, one of the weekend’s volunteer coordinators, leaned on the kitchen counter, her long grey hair pulled back into a low ponytail. She possessed a kind but tough energy, reminiscent of a battlefield nurse. Fifteen years ago, she was part of a group who founded El Refugio to provide a welcoming place for people visiting the detention center. As the hospitality house has grown, she has recruited volunteers at places like the grocery store, the college where her husband teaches and the preschool where she works.
McGinnis handed index cards to the other volunteers, each with a handwritten name and a smattering of personal details about someone detained at Stewart Detention Center. Some of their families live too far away to make the journey to Lumpkin, or their own immigration situation is too perilous, and they fear they might also be detained. So El Refugio volunteers go to Stewart for them. McGinnis noted that one man they were slated to see was about to be deported, and his family asked for someone to check on him. “It’s always really reassuring to them if we say, ‘We laid eyes on your person, and they’re okay,’” McGinnis said.
The index cards were color-coded: pink for Spanish-speaking women and blue for Spanish-speaking men, who had different visiting times. Grey cards were for English-speaking men. Yellow cards were for whoever was left, which covered a lot. El Refugio has received requests for someone to visit people who speak French, Arabic, Hindi, Mandarin, and Mayan indigenous languages.
The volunteers put on their shoes and got ready to go to Stewart. Most were new and seemed nervous. One was avoiding drinking too much coffee, because she was afraid she’d have to go to the bathroom during the visit. Another said the night before she’d had a nightmare that when she went to grab her ID, it was cut in half, so she couldn’t get into the detention center. Everyone nodded, sympathetically. Then the volunteers tucked the cards in their pockets, ran through the pouring rain to their cars and drove to the detention center.
At Stewart Detention Center, chain-link fences and tendrils of razor wire surround low-slung, boxy buildings. Some of the people inside were recently arrested and were waiting for their cases to unfold in immigration court. Others will be deported as soon as there is room on a bus or a plane.
Visitors press a button and must be buzzed into a large gate that locks behind them. The cramped visiting room has a handful of chairs, and a television playing MTV. If someone wants to use the bathroom, they have to pass through security checks and metal detectors. Visitors sign in and show their IDs, and many wait for hours until their appointment time.
Technically, detention centers are not prisons — immigration is a civil matter, not a criminal one. But like most detention centers, Stewart has all the same menacing features of a prison: cells with exposed metal toilets, guards using handcuffs, and tiny cubicles where families, separated from their loved ones by glass, talk on staticky phones.
Stewart was built in the 1990s by the private company now known as CoreCivic. The original plan for the buildings to be a state prison fell through, and they remained empty for years. In 2006, the company found a new customer: Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Stewart became, and remains today, one of the largest detention centers in the country. At times this year, the facility has had more than 2,300 people locked up, despite the fact that Stewart’s contractual capacity is under 2,000.
The county of Stewart, where Lumpkin is located, has benefited financially from the center’s presence. Despite not operating the facility, the county still gets $1 per day for every person detained at Stewart, according to Mac Moye, the county manager. Last year, Moye said the federal government paid more than $580,000, a significant portion of the county’s revenue. This year, he estimates the town will pull in even more, due to the immigration enforcement surge since President Donald Trump’s second term started in January.
Over the last two decades, the detention center has had a troubling history of suicides, hunger strikes, and accusations of medical neglect and sexual assault by staff. In a written statement, CoreCivic said that claims from “several years ago, much of which was unfounded and disputed by us, is not an accurate representation of [Stewart Detention Center] today.”
But as the number of people in detention swelled in the months after Trump’s second inauguration, interviews with people in Stewart described worsening conditions: men forced to sleep in common areas, because there weren't enough beds, or defecate in showers because there weren’t enough toilets — claims that CoreCivic also denied.
As the situation for immigrants across the country has become more perilous, El Refugio has had to adapt.
When the volunteers left for the morning visits at Stewart, McGinnis stayed at the house and locked the door behind them. She said she never used to do that.
El Refugio was founded on the principle of radical hospitality, a commitment to welcome anyone into the house who needs it. The Latin root of the word “hospitality” means “guest” or “stranger,” and calling El Refugio a “hospitality house” is meant to connote an openness to newcomers. But lately, the volunteers at El Refugio have had to learn to be more wary. Fearing federal agents coming to arrest immigrants, or someone who wants to attack visitors and the volunteers who help them, they’ve run drills and taped laminated instructions next to the door about what to do if ICE arrives.
“Every weekend that I come down here, I play out different scenarios in my mind about what could possibly happen,” McGinnis said.
Because of concerns that publicity might harm a person’s immigration case or put a family at risk, we agreed not to publish the full names and some identifying details about the visitors we met.
As McGinnis tidied the kitchen, another volunteer coordinator named Katie Quinlan Badeaux arrived with a red cooler full of food she’d lugged from Atlanta to share with El Refugio’s visitors that weekend. She said she believes that food is the quickest way to make people feel welcomed and showed us a cabinet full of tea, a pantry lined with snacks and shelves stacked high with beans: baked beans, pork and beans, black beans, various kinds of pintos. “There’s a bean for everyone!” McGinnis called from across the room with a laugh.
A little after 9 a.m., the first visitors of the weekend trickled in. One group said that guards at Stewart had sent them to El Refugio to use the bathroom. Another woman drove about three hours and needed to nap. Some of the people seemed to scan the volunteers’ faces, looking for the catch. McGinnis and Badeaux explained that no, they aren’t missionaries trying to convert anyone. And no, there’s no surprise price tag.
McGinnis and Badeaux offered each group a prepaid gas card, funded by donations to El Refugio, to help offset travel costs, and gave brief tours of the house. There were two bedrooms upstairs and three more downstairs. Each had freshly made beds and a welcome bag with a bar of soap set neatly on the pillows.
On the first floor, a world map hangs on the wall of the sitting room, covered with a rainbow of straight pins representing the countries visitors and volunteers had come from. Pins were stuck in every continent, though McGinnis thought the one in Antarctica was probably just a joke. In the dining room, a long wooden table that could fit two dozen people, stretched from end to end. On the wall next to it, a sign read: “When you have more than you need, build a longer table, not a higher wall.”
At one end of the table, a woman with grey hair twisted a Kleenex in her hand.
Her son had been arrested just days before, and she drove to Lumpkin with her granddaughter, a young woman in her twenties. The granddaughter said they’d been handling her father’s arrest differently. Her grandmother listened to every news story about immigration, fretting. The granddaughter, meanwhile, tried to stay relaxed. It’s not that she didn’t care, she explained, it’s that she was trying to hold it together and prepare for whatever came next.
At the other end of the table, two women, both wearing jeans and white tops, sat drinking coffee. They’d become friends recently, when their husbands were arrested together after work and ended up in the same cellblock at Stewart. A pile of tissues grew between them, as one dabbed her tears. Then they went to the bathroom to touch up their hair and makeup before heading to the detention center.
A 2-year-old with pigtails, wearing purple sunglasses, ran around with a banana she’d gotten from a bowl of fruit set out by volunteers. Her mother said she still does not understand why her father is behind glass when they visit him at Stewart.
In the kitchen, Kayla, a 22-year-old, cherub-cheeked woman with long black hair, ate snacks with her grandparents and aunt. They’d driven more than seven hours from North Carolina, stopping only for gas, to see Kayla’s father at Stewart Detention Center. He’d been arrested about a month before for driving on an expired license. He was considering leaving the U.S. voluntarily, instead of staying and fighting his case, to avoid the harsh conditions of detention.
He’d come to the U.S. when he was a child so that he and his family could work on farms. Now, he was on the cusp of turning 50. Kayla pulled up a picture on her phone of her father from a few months earlier, taken after he’d driven two hours to attend her college graduation, despite the risk that he might be pulled over. In the picture, he stands beside her, wearing her graduation cap and gown, both of them beaming.
Kayla tucked the phone back into her pocket. When she woke up at 4:45 a.m., she said, her grandmother was in the other room, packing a bag to bring to her father, so he’d have clothes when he’s deported. She could hear her grandmother talking to herself: “Is this one pretty? I think so. Will he need long sleeves? I think so.”
But when Kayla and her family arrived at the detention center that morning, they saw a sign stating that families were no longer allowed to drop off belongings for those detained there. Her father would have to fill out a request form, then the facility would grant the family permission to send a bag in the mail. By then, it could be too late. He might be gone.
McGinnis told us later that the new policy was only a few weeks old and gestured toward a pile of backpacks that volunteers had assembled to give to people held at Stewart. Without the bags of supplies, she worried some people would be deported with only the clothes they were arrested in. Immigration and Customs Enforcement did not respond to a request for comment, but CoreCivic confirmed bags were no longer allowed to be dropped off directly at the facility.
Kayla and her family walked to the door to head back to Stewart. A volunteer told them that if they were too tired to drive home after their visit, there would be beds waiting for them. Others trickled out of the house, too. The warm chatter that had filled the first floor quieted to a hum. Outside, crickets chirped.
No one came back to spend the night, but a woman knocked on the door and handed McGinnis a crumpled wad of bills. She had come to El Refugio earlier in the day. McGinnis let her know she didn’t have to donate anything, but the woman insisted. “I just want to help,” she said. She added that she planned to come back another day with meals to share.
In the past, McGinnis had refused to take money from families, but she’d decided it was important to let people contribute when they wanted to.
By around 7 p.m., only the volunteers remained. They filled their bowls with soup — lentil or beef — and gathered around the long dining room table. The volunteers had spent all day listening to stories from people detained at Stewart and their families. Now, they decompressed.
They shared memories about their favorite visits to Stewart. Badeaux recalled a time when she’d managed, through a combination of broken Spanish and basic English, to connect with a detained man, and they’d talked about how terrible exes could be. Mackenzie Hickson, a student from Spelman College, the historically Black women’s school in Atlanta, said she liked talking to people about the telenovelas they watched, and felt like, through their dramatic retellings, she had enjoyed entire episodes. Another volunteer remembered when the detained woman she visited heard her speak Russian and broke into happy tears, because she had not had any visitors in detention, much less a sympathetic American who spoke her language.
They also had listened to people share their grief: the families they missed back home, the complaints about bad food and poor medical care in the detention center.
The volunteers commiserated about how they felt like they had so little to offer people facing exile.
Badeaux looked over her soup and confessed that she’d been avoiding coming to El Refugio lately. The house desperately needed more fluent Spanish speakers, and she’d felt embarrassed about her limited language skills. Some of the volunteers nodded in sympathy and shared their anxieties about falling short. They bemoaned how imperfect they felt in the face of such high stakes.
McGinnis tried to reassure them.“ The group of us who started this work, we had no clue what we were doing,” she said. “We just did it.” McGinnis said they’d made plenty of mistakes over the years. The point, for her, was to do what they could. She didn’t feel like she could fix the immigration system, but she could show up, do laundry, or lay out turkey slices and bread for lunch.
Badeaux said she was grateful that McGinnis had kept texting her to come help. She’d felt nervous driving down. But once she walked in the door of the house, she felt better. “ The work we’re doing, we’re doing together,” Badeaux said.
El Refugio was started in 2010 by a group of recently arrived asylum seekers and U.S. citizens who had come to Lumpkin from the Atlanta area to protest at Stewart and to document abuses at the facility. They met families of detained people who’d driven many hours to Lumpkin and had no place to rest or eat in the small town. One of the group’s leaders had the idea of creating a safe space for families to gather. So they rented a three-bedroom house down the road from the detention center and staffed it with volunteers. A few years later, they formed a nonprofit and, in 2015, hired Amilcar Valencia as executive director.
Many of the founders were motivated by their Christian faiths, including Catholic and Mennonite, but now not all of the volunteers come from a religious tradition. Still, they remain committed to the core tenet of welcoming everyone.
Eventually, the single bathroom and bunk beds in the tiny yellow house were too small to serve the many families passing through. In 2018, the comedian Samantha Bee’s show “Full Frontal” did a Christmas special critical of deportations of immigrants during the first Trump administration. As part of that episode, the show bought a larger house and donated it to El Refugio, and the organization continued to expand. It now has four paid staff members, around 80 regular volunteers, and a yearly budget under $500,000, sustained by donations and grants.
El Refugio has weathered many challenges, including previous surges in immigration enforcement and the COVID-19 pandemic, which forced it to suspend regular operations. Yet Valencia said this current moment is the hardest in the organization’s 15-year history. As Trump continues to ramp up detention, the need has grown, and volunteers have had to field more requests for legal support and advocacy for detainees.
“People are hurting, families are torn apart. People who have been here for many years are now being deported with no chance to make it back. Kids are growing up without their parents. It’s because of this whole immigration detention system,” Valencia said.
But the work of El Refugio, he said, is a reminder that “in the midst of everything, there is something you could do.”
Sunday morning, around 8 a.m., a group of volunteers headed back to Stewart, index cards in hand. McGinnis stayed at El Refugio and sat on the couch, squinting at her laptop computer. “Shoot. Darn it,” she muttered.
There was a woman being held at Stewart, a wife and mother, who was going to be deported soon. Her family wanted to see her while she was still there, but they had no car. McGinnis found a ride for them, but she couldn’t find the family’s number to call them. She shut the laptop, closed her eyes, and sighed. “One of the things that’s hard to learn… is to do what you can do and then let go of the things that you can’t do,” she said.
She went back to getting the house ready for the day’s visitors, laying out snacks and making coffee. A short time later, the first family of the day arrived: a mother, father and two toddlers who had started driving around 5:30 a.m. to make the three-hour trip from northwest Georgia. They’d already signed in at the detention center and were waiting for their appointment.
McGinnis took them to the front room of the house, filled with big soft chairs and beautifully embroidered pillows from Guatemala sent by someone who had stayed at El Refugio before their loved one was deported. In the corner stood a kitchen playset and a pirate ship, and baskets full of toys. The children pretended to bake cupcakes, and their mother, Millicent, whispered that her father was in detention. She said when they went to sign in at Stewart, the children were scared of the large gates that clanged shut behind them. Millicent confided that she still hadn’t told the children their grandfather was detained. How do you explain that to a toddler?
Millicent’s father arrived in the U.S. as a child, a refugee from Southeast Asia. When he was a young man, he was arrested for a drug charge, so he couldn’t get U.S. citizenship. And now, he’d been caught up in Trump’s massive deportation efforts. Millicent voted for Trump, and when the president said he wanted to deport criminals, she thought he meant people who were dangerous and convicted of crimes like murder or rape. She didn’t think he was talking about her father, a refugee who now operates a business. She no longer believed Trump was interested in safety. “ It was just really all about hate,” she said.
A short while later, a blonde woman named Chastity, wearing a green dress, arrived at El Refugio and settled onto the couch. She, too, had supported Trump and had been surprised by the size of the immigration raids. Her husband, an Argentinian, was a U.S. Marine Corps veteran who served tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan. But after he fell behind in his paperwork while hospitalized for post-traumatic stress disorder, his work permit expired. He had been arrested a few weeks earlier in South Georgia after being pulled over for a license plate violation and was facing deportation back to Argentina. At first, Chastity said she called lawmakers and elected officials, sure that it was a mistake. But now, she believes the government is just trying to deport as many people as possible. Their daughter, who was in junior ROTC, was planning to follow in her father’s footsteps in the military. Now, Chastity said her daughter worried that the country she wants to serve can no longer be trusted to have her family’s back.
Chastity chatted with a woman next to her on the couch, whose husband had also been detained recently. Two more families were nearby on kitchen chairs. They exchanged tips on how to get power of attorney — so they could keep their homes if their partners were deported — and shared information about which phones in the visiting room at Stewart had the most static.
In the hallway next to the dining room, Veronica, a 24-year-old woman with a broad smile, tried on a pair of jeans she’d pulled out of a fully stocked wardrobe. El Refugio keeps clothes on hand because the detention center has a strict dress code and visitors can be turned away for minor infractions, like wearing sleeveless shirts or skirts that are too short. Veronica said the guards told her that a tiny hole in her jeans, just below the knee, was not appropriate, so she was looking for something else to wear so that she could see her fiancé.
For the last seven weekends, Veronica had driven six hours from Asheville, North Carolina, to Lumpkin. Each time, she’d had one hour to spend with her fiancé, then turned around and drove back home the same day. One week, her car’s alternator broke. Another time, her tire popped. Then the rim of a tire split. So this week, her mother paid for a rental car and came with her.
Veronica said she planned to sell all her possessions on Facebook Marketplace so she could move to Colombia, a country she has never been to, to join her fiancé, who had decided to leave voluntarily instead of waiting to be deported. She said her family is devastated, but she was looking on the bright side. ”I'm learning how to salsa dance,” she shrugged.
In the dining room, the long table was full. Two teenagers from different families were doing chemistry homework. In the front room, a grandmother chatted with two Russian-speaking volunteers. She lived with her son’s large family near Atlanta. There were seven people in the household, but her son was the only other one who spoke Russian. So she'd been forced to rely on pantomime to communicate with the rest of the family since he'd been detained. Sitting with the volunteers, she talked non-stop, saying all the things she’d not been able to say lately — how she couldn’t figure out how to operate the electric stove on her own and concerns about her health.
You could hear families crying in the corner. Others laughed, distracting themselves with games until the time for their visit. In the backyard, children played on the jungle gym, and parents sat under a pear tree, eating its fruit. One volunteer tracked down Cheetos because it was an elderly visitor’s favorite snack.
Volunteers emptied the trash and started the dishwasher. Another pulled laundry from the dryer and made beds for the next week. Badeaux and McGinnis tallied the number of people who had passed through El Refugio that weekend: 60, a big weekend for them and a sign of the growing number of people being locked up at Stewart.
Badeaux was proud that they had served so many people that weekend, but she couldn’t stop thinking about the bigger picture and wondering how the massive wave of detention and deportation would ever stop. McGinnis stood beside her. “I’m so glad we’re here,” McGinnis said. “And I’m so upset though that this is the reality that exists right here and now.”
We reached out to the families we spoke to during our visit to El Refugio to see how the cases of their loved ones had progressed. Most of them remain in limbo. Veronica said her fiancé is now in Colombia, and she plans to join him soon. Kayla’s father found a lawyer, and she expects him to be granted legal documentation and to be able to stay in the United States.
Julieta Martinelli is a Pulitzer Prize-winning senior producer and investigative reporter at Futuro Media. She leads long-form narrative and serialized audio documentaries on immigration, prisons, and the criminal legal system.
