On a late summer morning, all the stores in the downtown square in Lumpkin, Georgia, are closed except for two — the combination liquor-corner store, and a museum.
“Thirty-five years ago when my husband brought me here, every store on this square had a business in it,” said Alice Hamilton while she rocked in a wooden rocking chair in the historic Bedingfield Inn. It was a stagecoach inn that was built around 1836 and is a museum today. Hamilton works there.
She hadn’t seen another person all day.
About a mile away, nearly 2,000 people were detained at Stewart Detention Center. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement spends millions of dollars a year detaining immigrants there and in two other facilities in Georgia…