“ICE team will come and get you”: Fake text messages threaten members of Atlanta’s Latino community with deportation

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In the weeks following Donald Trump’s election to a second presidential term, Latino advocacy organizations around the Atlanta area have received reports from community members who say they’ve gotten fraudulent text messages, in English and Spanish, threatening them with deportation. Local organizations have also learned of flyers with similar threats posted in public parks, including one reported this week in Trammell Crow Park in South Fulton.

Ser Familia, a nonprofit organization that provides Spanish-language mental health services, shared one such bogus text message with 285 South: “You have been one of the selected immigrants that is set to be deported,” it read. “Be packed at November 13, at 12 AM. Executive ICE team will come and get you in a Brown Van.”

Jeff Carter, chief of media operations for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, confirmed to 285 South that ICE had nothing to do with the messages, though he said the agency is aware of their existence. “ICE does not operate in that fashion,” Carter said. “We do targeted enforcement. We don’t send broadcast emails to individuals.” He directed 285 South to a statement issued by the FBI confirming that Black communities, high school students, and LGBTQIA+ people have also received offensive emails and texts. 

Local nonprofits working closely with members of the community, like the Latino Community Fund–Georgia and Ser Familia, have also received worrying reports about schoolchildren being taunted or threatened by their classmates in the days and weeks after November 5—which has beencausing some students to stay home. “Several schools have communicated with us because they have high absenteeism with Latino children,” said Belisa Urbina, cofounder of Ser Familia. “You’ll see a lot of the kids now not wanting to go to school. They are very scared.” 

“It is disgusting [and] it is concerning,” said Gilda Pedraza, executive director of the Latino Community Fund Georgia, adding that she’s heard of children expressing fear that they’ll come back from school and find their parents deported. “It’s very fresh in many of our minds, during the first Trump administration—when there was an indiscriminate immigration enforcement—that children did not want to go to school because of fear of coming back home and finding parents deported.”

Vying to retake the presidency, Trump campaigned this year on a hard-line anti-immigration platform that included promises of the largest deportation plan in history; Trump has said he intends to declare a national emergency and use the U.S. military to assist in those efforts. Immigration attorneys, local advocates, and voters have told 285 South that, with Trump’s win, targeted communities can expect to see a rise in anti-immigrant rhetoric. 

Contacted for comment, local law enforcement agencies had little to share about the apparent threats. The Fulton County Sheriff’s Office said in an email that, as of Tuesday afternoon, it wasn’t aware of any incidents. The Cobb County Sheriff’s Office has not received reports of threatening messages about deportations.  

The Cobb County Police Department and the Dekalb County Police Department redirected an inquiry to their open records office. The Gwinnett County Police Department had not responded at the time of publication. This week, Fox 5 Atlanta reported that police in South Fulton were investigating the threatening flyers left in Trammell Crow Park.

The threats received by immigrants follow racist texts that many Black Americans around the country reported getting in the days after the election. A spokesperson for Trump has said that the “campaign has absolutely nothing to do with these text messages.”

Reporting fraudulent text messages to local law enforcement

Community leaders are encouraging people receiving these texts to alert the authorities.

“It’s important that people know: If you receive these texts, report them to the FBI,” Pedraza said, emphasizing that their contents are “a lie”: “Nobody is targeting anyone for deportation right now, and they will never do that via text or anything like that.” 

These messages are being sent by people trying to spread fear among immigrant communities, Urbina added: “This is done by people that certainly are malicious, that just want to create despair and fear in the community.” 

Pedraza also said that it’s important for local authorities to reassure impacted community members that they will be protected and there won’t be retaliation if they report receiving these texts. Concerns of those kinds, she added, ultimately make it difficult to understand how widespread these messages are. 

“If someone has mixed status or is undocumented and is getting one of these emails or text messages, they will not go to law enforcement to report it, because they will be afraid of being targeted for immigration enforcement,” Pedraza said. 

“It’s important for law enforcement to actually come out and say that they are sworn to protect all communities—that this is important to them, and that people should come and denounce it,” she continued. “It’s a crime, it’s harassment, and everybody should reject that.”