The city of Atlanta is slated to receive $10.8 million in federal funding to provide housing and other humanitarian assistance to migrants while they await the outcome of their immigration cases.
The grant comes from FEMA’s Shelter and Services Program (SSP), which distributes money to communities nationwide that are providing services to migrants amid an unprecedented border surge. Because Atlanta doesn’t operate its own migrant shelter or provide direct services to newcomers, the city will act as more of a conduit for the federal funds, which it will funnel to area nonprofits such as the Latin American Association.
In total, the SSP program will disburse over $600 million nationwide this fiscal year, which started last October and will run through September.
Atlanta’s $11 million slice of that pie is bigger than that of any single recipient away from border states or New York. It also exceeds the SSP funding the city received last year, which tallied $4.85 million.
Santiago Marquez, the Latin American Association’s CEO, said the bulk of the federal money will be used for shelter and temporary housing. That includes metro area hotels where migrants can stay for weeks at a time while they figure out how to find work and support themselves.
The FEMA funding will help migrants beyond Atlanta’s borders.
On Thursday, the Savannah-based Migrant Equity Southeast (MESE), an immigrant-serving nonprofit, announced it had partnered with the city of Atlanta to receive FEMA funding and distribute food, shelter, and supportive services to new arrivals in the area.
The aim is “to welcome new members of the immigrant community in South Georgia [and] to provide basic needs and uplift the people who navigate an arduous process of adapting to a new country, language and culture,” said MESE in a press release.
In a statement this spring, FEMA said support for communities is part of the government’s “efforts to manage and secure our borders in a safe, orderly and humane way.” Amid polls that show immigration is a top issue for voters ahead of this year’s presidential election, the Biden administration rolled out strict new restrictions last month on migrants’ ability to apply for asylum protections to help “gain control” of the border.
In recent years, federal authorities registered record high numbers of illegal crossings at the U.S.-Mexico border – though that trend has begun to wane in 2024. Because of limited detention and deportation capacity, many of the apprehended migrants have been released while they pursue their case in the country’s backlogged immigration court system, a development that has put strain on cities nationwide.
Atlanta was never the target of the politically-motivated busing campaigns that sent thousands of migrants from the border to liberal-run cities such as New York or Chicago. But migrants relocated here on their own, with the beliefs that jobs would be plentiful playing a role.
It’s difficult to say exactly how many recent border crossers have come to Atlanta, but immigration court data can paint an instructive picture.
So far this fiscal year, federal authorities have filed 60,343 so-called notices to appear for deportation cases in Atlanta, according to an analysis of immigration court data by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a research institute at Syracuse University. The people summoned to immigration court in Atlanta don’t all necessarily live in the metro area, many are also residents of other parts of the state. In 2023, there were 52,913 notices to appear in Atlanta’s immigration court. In 2019, before the post-COVID global migration surge, that number was 21,734.
Besides recent arrivals who illegally crossed the border, the yearly number of notices to appear also includes people who have lived here a long time or who moved to other states but have their court cases in Atlanta. But the data is still broadly reflective of trends at the border, and it provides insights on who the newcomers are.
This fiscal year, the biggest groups of people with new deportation cases in Georgia have been from Mexico (19,022), Venezuela (12,877), Guatemala (9,365), Colombia (4,710), and Honduras (3,664).
To help manage the FEMA grant for the last fiscal year, Atlanta city government has signaled a plan to bring on a third-party contractor, for a $200,000 fee.
About the Author
