Reported and written by Timothy Pratt.
On Tuesday, March 19 at 8:40 AM, a post written in Spanish began circulating on Facebook pages formed by different Latino groups in the Athens area.
“There’s a checkpoint at Mitchell Bridge Rd. Be careful,” it read. A screenshot from Google Maps showed the road highlighted in blue where Athens-Clarke County police were stationed, checking for drivers licenses, seatbelts and otherwise promoting “safe driving” – to use the police department’s own language describing the operation.
Although police had previously announced the checkpoint, saying it was aimed at making roads in the area safer, comments in Spanish underneath the post showed that at least some local residents saw things in a different light.
“May God protect them,” wrote one, referring to anyone driving in the area.
The concern: an undocumented Latino driver or passenger would get caught up in the checkpoint, and wind up being deported. The operation was not the only one of its kind recently staged in communities outside the I-285 perimeter. Lilburn police held another one earlier this month according to a Telemundo report. There have also been others in Gwinnett, said Rosalba Alvarez, organizer for the Georgia Latino Alliance for Human Rights, or GLAHR, and a 20-year Athens resident.
Still others have been rumored, but turned out to be false, keeping community members busy on social media trying to inform their neighbors, said Alvarez.
And although both Athens-Clarke and Lilburn police have publicly repeated the goal of public safety, many Latinos are seeing the recent checkpoints as a harbinger of things to come if HB 1105 – “The Georgia Criminal Alien Track and Report Act”– passes the state legislature and is signed into law by Governor Brian Kemp. The bill has passed the House and the Senate; the House has to reconcile the Senate version before the 2024 session ends tomorrow (Thursday).
HB 1105 would give police departments throughout Georgia the authority to determine a person’s immigration status and to arrest and transport them to federal immigration detention centers based on that determination. Failure to comply could lead to a range of penalties, including losing funding.
Azadeh Shahshahani, legal and advocacy director for Project South, said the bill’s support in the legislature is a case of “politicians taking advantage of Latinos for political gain – as we’ve seen so many times before.” She was referring to the calls from some Georgia residents for lawmakers to respond to the tragic death of nursing student Laken Riley, whose assailant was allegedly in the country without documents.
The bill’s backers say it will help prevent such a crime from recurring.
The problem, according to Lena Graber, staff attorney at the Immigrant Legal Resource Center, is that “immigration regulations and enforcement are not a public safety measure or tool. They are totally independent from crime rates.”
Graber, an expert on the role of police in enforcing immigration laws, said a section of the bill authorizing police to transport a person suspected of being undocumented to a “federal facility in this state or to any other temporary point of detention” was “unprecedented,” as this authority doesn’t currently exist in other jurisdictions.
Another section authorizes police to arrest anyone “based on such person’s status as an illegal alien,” and another part of the bill appears to grant police immunity from any liability if they incorrectly arrest someone with legal residency documents. “If you screw this up, you’re okay,” said Graber.
A report from TRAC – a Syracuse University immigration data research outfit – shows that ICE, the federal immigration agency, mistakenly issued a “detainer,” or “immigration hold,” on hundreds of U.S. citizens, and tens of thousands of legal permanent residents, during a four-year period.
The proposed law “allows for the profiling of immigrants through traffic stops,” said Sarah Owings, a veteran Atlanta immigration attorney. “It creates a chilling effect on certain communities of color. It’s scary to families of mixed immigration status.” At least a half-million people in Georgia come from families of mixed status, meaning at least one family member is undocumented, according to a 2020 estimate.
The law would also likely result in more people detained in the federal immigration system, in a state that already has the third-highest number of detained immigrants in the country, according to a recent report.
Meanwhile, before the bill has even become law, community organizations are staging carpools with residents who have licenses, and continue to share information about checkpoints, both verified and rumored, said Alvarez.
If H.B. 1105 is signed into law, she said, “fear is going to grow…People will stop going to work. Children will feel trauma. I don’t even want to think about it…Landscaping, construction, restaurants, house cleaning – it would affect all of that.”
“But,” she added, “we’re going to have to band together more, and organize.”
