After Georgia House Republicans backed a bill that would require all police departments to help identify undocumented immigrants, arrest them and detain them for deportation, several advocacy groups and politicians have criticized the measure. .
The House voted 97-74 last Thursday in favor of HB 1105, sponsored by state Rep. Jesse Petrea, R-Savannah, after police charged a Venezuelan man with beating a nursing student to death in the campus of the University of Georgia.
The measure moved to the state Senate for further debate.
José Ibarra was arrested last Friday accused of murder and assault for the death of 22-year-old Laken Riley.
Ibarra, 26, is a Venezuelan citizen who, according to immigration authorities, crossed irregularly into the United States in 2022.
State Rep. Jesse Petrea, R-Savannah, speaks at the Georgia Capitol on March 6, 2023. Associated Press
Riley was a nursing student at Augusta University's Athens campus after starting at the University of Georgia.
She was found dead on February 22, after a roommate reported that she had not returned from a morning run in a wooded area.
The bill also establishes new requirements for how correctional officers must check with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to determine if a person is in the country illegally.
The Georgia Association of Latino Elected Officials made public its concerns about the measure in a statement last Monday: “The current list of proposals [...]
would violate constitutional freedoms
, ignore the needs of local communities and perpetuate harmful stereotypes about Latinos and immigrants.”
“[It is] what I would call an explosion of attacks, threats, ways of making our brothers and sisters who are immigrants uncomfortable,” declared Dr. Ben Williams, president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in the Cobb County.
Meanwhile, the Cobb Immigrant Alliance accused the state's governor, Republican Brian Kemp, who has been a strong critic of the Biden Administration on the issue of immigration, of creating fear and hatred towards the immigrant community in Georgia.
However, Petrea argues that the measure is necessary to enforce existing state law that requires police to check with ICE the immigration status of people who do not appear to be US citizens, according to The Associated Press news agency.
“Fixing politics in the face of an unspeakable tragedy is not politics,” said Rep. Houston Gaines, R-Athens.
“It's doing the right thing to ensure something like this doesn't happen again.”
Police departments
have denied that they are ignoring the law to consult with ICE
.
The bill would make law enforcement officers who fail to check immigration status guilty of a misdemeanor.
The bill would also deny state funding to jails and sheriff's offices that do not cooperate.
Democrats warned that the bill would lead to prolonged detentions, separate parents born in other countries from their American-born children and spark distrust of police in immigrant communities.
They said it was based on the false idea that immigrants bring crime, and cited studies showing that immigrants are less likely to commit crimes.
“We want justice to be done for what happened to Laken Riley.
We don't want violent people who are here legally or not on the streets,” said Rep. Esther Panitch, D-Sandy Springs.
“But this bill won't do that.
This bill will not close our borders.
“It won’t make us safer, and it won’t make women safer.”
The law would bring Georgia closer to states with more aggressive immigration laws such as Texas, which starting in March will allow police to detain immigrants who enter the state illegally and give local judges authority to remove them from the country.
The state of Georgia itself passed a harsh anti-immigration law in 2011, although it later withdrew some of its parts.
Rep. Pedro Marín, D-Duluth and the longest-serving Latino member of the House, said he had seen people take advantage of fear of foreigners before.
I have witnessed time and again how ambitious representatives and senators
use fear as a strategy
to achieve and maintain electoral office,” Marín explained.
But Rep. Rey Martinez, a Latino Republican from Loganville, said his party only goes after criminals.
“We are not after immigrants.
We don't chase them.
“We are not after them,” Martinez said.
“What we are going after is these people who commit crimes.
That's what we're after."
Petrea added a scathing criticism of Ibarra: “He said he was here for asylum.
She was here for assault.”
The requirement to assist ICE would require eligible cities and counties to apply for what is known as a 287(g) agreement to allow local agents to enforce immigration law.
It's unclear how many would be accepted: President Joe Biden's administration has downplayed the program.
The Immigrant Legal Resource Center counted in July that six of Georgia's 159 counties have 287(g) agreements with ICE.
Five of them are just prisons.
Oconee County, a suburb of Athens, serves detainers for immigration violations and deportation orders.
State agencies also cooperate with ICE.
At least
three Georgia counties have abandoned cooperation with ICE
in jails, according to the center, including two large suburban Atlanta counties – Gwinnett and Cobb – where it was a major campaign issue.
“This program destroyed families, children and families,” said Democratic Representative Sam Park of Lawrenceville.
But Petrea explained that local assistance is necessary.
“Failure to cooperate with federal immigration authorities
endangers public safety
and makes a mockery of our nation's immigration laws, period,” he stressed.
With information from
The Associated Press
and
FOX 5 Atlanta