Paul Bridges’ life turned “surreal” three years ago after he started fighting Georgia’s stringent immigration enforcement law.
The former mayor of this tiny South Georgia town has been featured on CNN. He testified before Congress and met President Barack Obama at the White House about overhauling the nation’s immigration system. And then Bridges got a call last month from Jack Schlossberg, the grandson of the late President John F. Kennedy.
Schlossberg wanted to know whether Bridges would accept a prestigious JFK Profile in Courage Award from his grandfather’s presidential library foundation. The foundation is honoring Bridges — a Republican — for “risking his mayoral career” by opposing Georgia’s immigration law, a measure drafted and signed into law by Republicans in a politically deep red state. Bridges withstood scathing criticism across the country, according to the foundation. And politics turned toxic for him in his hometown.
When he receives the award May 4 in Boston, Bridges will be joining the ranks of the firefighters and other public servants who responded to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, former United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan and John Lewis, the Georgia congressman and a civil rights icon. The foundation is presenting the same award to former President George H.W. Bush this year.
Bridges marvels at how far he has come since growing up in poverty on a farm in southeastern Georgia’s Treutlen County.
“I’m still not sure I’m in reality,” said Bridges, 61, who raises goats here and works for a company that helps people appeal their property tax assessments. “I’m just so humbled by this.”
Before it was challenged in federal court, Georgia’s immigration law would have punished people who — while committing another crime — are caught knowingly transporting or harboring immigrants living illegally in the U.S. A separate provision in the law gives police the option to check the immigration status of certain suspects. State lawmakers said they needed to act in 2011 to protect Georgia’s taxpayer-funded resources because the federal government had failed to secure the nation’s borders. There were 425,000 immigrants living without papers in Georgia in 2010, according to an estimate by the Pew Hispanic Center.
Bridges and his fellow plaintiffs sued to block the state law, saying it would interfere with the federal government’s immigration enforcement and is therefore unconstitutional. The former mayor also said in court papers that he could face prosecution for letting immigrants without papers stay with him and for giving them a ride to their churches and doctor offices, as he had done in the past. In 2012, a federal court permanently blocked the provision in Georgia’s law that would punish people for transporting or harboring immigrants living illegally in the U.S. But a federal appeals court upheld the other provision that gives police the option of investigate certain suspects’ immigration status.
Phil Kent, a member of Georgia’s Immigration Enforcement Review Board and the spokesman for Americans for Immigration Control, disputed Bridges’ assertions about the law and disagreed with the decision to give him the award.
“If anything, courage awards ought to be given to the authors of the legislation who had to endure threats and smears from radical open borders activists,” Kent said.
Bridges also said the law could split up families and damage the Uvalda area’s agriculture-based economy, which relies on migrant Hispanic laborers. The passage of Georgia’s immigration law scared away some of those laborers who used to work in the region, Bridges said.
As he piloted his red pickup truck along the Uvalda area's deeply rutted dirt roads last week, he pointed to communities in Montgomery County where he said former Hispanic migrant workers have settled, renovated homes and launched new businesses. Bridges pulled up beside some woods, where Mexican workers were bailing pine straw. In Spanish, he asked one of the workers what he thought of Georgia's immigration law. Juan Gonsalez responded by asking who would do his work if he weren't there? Gonsalez, who has no legal status in the U.S., also described how his productivity contributes to the region's economy. As he spoke, his two U.S.-born children played nearby.
With a population of about 600, Bridges’ Spanish moss-draped town sits more than 170 miles southeast of Atlanta. Stretching just 1.5 square miles, the town has only one stoplight. Blueberry and Vidalia onion fields dot the region.
Bridges did not seek re-election after his mayoral term ended last year. He said things became difficult for him in Uvalda after he joined a coalition of civil and immigrant rights groups in suing to block Georgia’s immigration law.
City residents disagreed with his use of his title as mayor in his campaign against the statute, Uvalda Police Chief Lewis Smith said. The police chief accused Bridges of neglecting his unpaid duties as mayor when he was in Washington, a charge Bridges vigorously denies.
The City Council passed a resolution stripping Bridges of his mayoral powers last year. And in August, dozens of members of the League of the South — a group that wants the South to secede from the rest of the nation — demonstrated in Uvalda against Bridges and “southern demographic displacement.” They accused Bridges of supporting amnesty for immigrants who are illegally in the U.S. and they presented Smith with a Robert E. Lee Award of Duty.
“The only reason he didn’t run (for re-election) is because he knew he couldn’t win,” Smith said. “The whole city is overwhelmingly against Paul Bridges.”
Karen Tumlin, one of the attorneys who argued against Georgia’s law in court, said Bridges acted courageously by speaking out at a time when several other states were passing similar laws.
“It is absolutely not for the faint of heart to become a plaintiff in one of these cases,” said Tumlin, a managing attorney for the National Immigration Law Center. “When you put yourself out there, you make yourself a target for the other side and for folks who choose to disagree with you, whether it is civilly or not civilly.”
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