ICE arrests in Georgia region among the nation’s highest

And Atlanta’s ICE field office — which oversees immigration enforcement in Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina — accounts for the fifth-highest number of immigration arrests in the nation. Only field offices in Miami (15,566), New Orleans (11,438), Dallas (10,902) and Houston (10,494) produced more arrests.

The federal dataset containing the ICE arrest tallies was obtained through a lawsuit filed by the Deportation Data Project at the law school of the University of California, Berkeley.

Immigration advocates say the result of aggressive enforcement has been immigrant communities seized by fear, with families reeling from both family separation and the economic fallout of losing breadwinners to ICE detention and deportation.

“It feels to many of us like open season,” said Gigi Pedraza, executive director of the Atlanta-based Latino Community Fund.

Outside of Georgia immigrant enclaves, though, many ICE arrests have largely gone unnoticed. That’s because roughly half of all apprehensions in Georgia have taken place out of public view, inside local jails.

That stands in sharp contrast with immigration agents’ mode of operation in more left-leaning jurisdictions, where sanctuary laws block ICE’s access to local lockups.

In California, ICE has conducted extensive worksite raids, which have led to rising tension and protests. In New York, agents have systematically targeted immigrants summoned to court hearings. The New York City and Los Angeles ICE field offices’ arrests numbers lag far behind those of Atlanta, despite those jurisdictions’ outsized immigrant populations.

In a recent interview with The New York Times, Tom Homan, the Trump border czar, said picking up immigrants in local jails is preferred.

“If I had a choice, I’d much rather be in a jail because it’s safer for the neighborhood, safer for the officer and safer for the public,” he said.

Nearly 2,500 of the immigrants arrested in Georgia have already been deported — amounting to 44%.

The failure of deportations to keep pace with surging arrests, combined with a policy change that has made bond less accessible to immigrants in custody, helps account for increasingly crowded conditions inside Georgia’s ICE detention facilities.

Immigrants from Mexico accounted for the largest share of people arrested by ICE in Georgia since Trump’s return to power, just over 37%, followed by nationals of Guatemala, Venezuela, Honduras and Colombia.

Criminal background

Although Trump officials have stressed that any immigrant living in the U.S. without authorization is vulnerable to arrest, detention and deportation, the administration has maintained that people with criminal backgrounds remain a priority for enforcement.

In Georgia, roughly 76% of immigrants arrested by ICE since January had convictions or pending criminal charges — down from 87% the last half year of the Biden administration.

“ICE Atlanta arrested some of the worst of the worst, including child molesters, rapists, drug traffickers, and murderers,” Department of Homeland Security assistant press secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “Under President Trump and Secretary (Kristi) Noem, ICE is delivering on the American people’s mandate to get criminal illegal aliens OUT of our country.”

It is unclear how many of those arrested by ICE with criminal backgrounds had committed or been accused of committing violent crimes.

Booking data from the sheriff’s office in Gwinnett County, the state’s most immigrant-heavy jurisdiction, shows that driving without a license was the most common offense landing immigrant residents in county jail — and on ICE’s radar.

In a separate dataset published by the Deportation Data Project tallying removals from January to June, 87% of people deported by the Atlanta ICE office who had criminal backgrounds were deemed to be “not aggravated felons.”

Under immigration law, aggravated felonies include drug offenses and a range of violent crimes, among others. The Deportation Data Project noted that its removals dataset may not include records of all deportations.

“Clearly, they are not targeting criminals in our state. Most of the ones that they are indicating as ‘criminal’ are for minor traffic violations,” said Jerry Gonzalez, CEO of the Galeo Impact Fund, an organization that works to expand Latino political power in Georgia. “The danger is that with this indiscriminate racial profiling that is happening, immigrants will not trust local law enforcement officials.”