The state senate expects to vote Thursday on a bill that would require localities to comply with ICE detainer requests.
Georgia Republicans are taking action in response to the murder of Laken Riley, advancing legislation to ensure that localities in the state are diligent about detaining illegal-immigrant offenders, like the man accused of beating Riley to death on the University of Georgia campus in Athens.
The Georgia Criminal Alien Track and Report Act of 2024, which passed the state house last month, imposes strict penalties on localities that refuse to cooperate with federal immigration authorities on the detention, removal, and investigation of illegal aliens in the state. The state senate expects to hold a vote on Thursday after the bill gets out of committee.
“This bill began as an effort to ensure that when we have an individual who commits a crime in our communities, when they are placed into custody and identified, when they are discovered to be in the country illegally, that we always report that individual to federal immigration authorities,” Georgia state representative Jesse Petrea, the bill’s sponsor, told National Review.
Riley, a nursing student at the University of Georgia, was beaten to death with an unknown weapon while she was jogging near campus. Illegal immigrant Antonio Ibarra has been charged with Laken’s murder, false imprisonment, kidnapping, and hiding the death of a person.
Having crossed the border into Texas in September 2022, Ibarra evaded ICE once before because New York City intentionally sidestepped the agency — precisely the problem Petrea’s bill is trying to solve in Georgia, where some 180 illegal immigrants are incarcerated.
Before the murder, Ibarra and his brother had multiple run-ins with law enforcement. Ibarra was arrested in September 2023 for endangering the welfare of a child, his wife’s son, who had no restraint or helmet on as he rode on the back of Ibarra’s moped. Instead of obliging ICE’s request that aliens be kept in custody before they’re transferred and entered into deportation proceedings, New York City released Ibarra before his detainer could be issued. In December, Ibarra had an active bench warrant for his arrest.
The bill was not drafted as a knee-jerk reaction to Riley’s murder as Democrats have alleged — it was drafted a year ago — but it’s all the more urgent now, Petrea said.
“We all know the federal government has failed,” Georgia state representative Houston Gaines, who represents Athens, said on the state House floor a couple of weeks ago. “The southern border is a disaster. . . . We also know that local governments have failed. Some local governments have created an atmosphere where those who are here in this country illegally are encouraged.”
While it’s already state law that local law enforcement must alert and comply with federal authorities if there are aliens in their jails, H.B. 1105 adds tougher penalties for violations. For instance, any sheriff’s office or law-enforcement agency of a local governing body that flouts the bill will be subject to the withholding of certain state funding.
Putting local officials on notice isn’t an empty gesture, Petrea said, as some sheriffs in Georgia stubbornly boast that they won’t work with the federal government on immigration enforcement. Some of Georgia’s biggest metropolitan areas and their suburbs have effectively sworn off cooperating with ICE. In Athens-Clarke County, where Riley’s murder occurred, the sheriff publicly admitted that he would not honor ICE detainers.
Then-candidate for Athens-Clarke sheriff John Williams said in 2020: “It is not my intention to cooperate with detainers.”
“I see it as the sheriff’s responsibility to protect the community,” Williams added in a video interview with Athens Political Nerd on the campaign trail. “We can’t help with a culture of fear in our community and expect our community to respond and help us in situations.”
Williams urged against “antagonizing people because they are undocumented” and suggested that his department would not be keeping track of aliens in the community.
Asked for comment, the Clarke County Sheriff’s Office doubled down on its policy, saying that ICE requests to hold foreign-national inmates will be denied if they’re not signed by a judge.
“The law requires us to notify ICE whenever we book someone either known or suspected to be a foreign national” the office said. “Our policy reflects that. ICE detainers are requests, not a court order or warrant. Holding a person based solely on an ICE detainer constitutes a warrantless arrest.”
Illegal aliens would therefore be able to be released or bond out before ICE could pick them up from jail. The office also claims that Ibarra had never been arrested in Athens-Clarke County or the state of Georgia, though, according to local news outlets, he was cited for shoplifting last year in Athens.
“The Sheriff’s Office’s first contact with him was when he was charged with the murder, and he is currently confined and held with no bail,” the spokesperson said.
As promised in his campaign, Sheriff Kebo Taylor of Gwinnett County, which is right outside Atlanta with almost a million residents, on his first day in office in January 2021 canceled the jail’s partnership with ICE. The specific program had allowed deputies to screen people coming into jail to determine their legal status.
“What we will not be doing is notifying ICE of anybody’s immigration status in the jail or any of our facilities,” Taylor said after getting sworn in. “We will not keep anyone in jail under an ICE detainer. If ICE or anybody else brings someone to the Gwinnett County jail and they have a legitimate warrant signed by a judge, then we will honor that.”.
The Gwinnett County Board of Commissioners in December 2022 unanimously approved a $50,000 pay increase for Taylor to a total of $193,000 salary, the highest among Georgia’s four most populous counties, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Petrea said that some district attorneys also have animosity toward federal immigration authorities.
“They don’t like them, they campaign on it, whether they’re district attorneys, whether they’re sheriffs. . . . They brag about it,” he said. “Do they have culpability here?”
While rogue prosecutors have had an impact in major cities such as Chicago and New York City, they’ve impacted Athens, too. As part of her proposed prosecution and bail reform, Athens district attorney Deborah Gonzalez vowed on her first day in office to “take into account collateral consequences to undocumented defendants” before deciding whether to charge criminals. At a 2018 rally advocating the rights of illegal aliens, Gonzalez said: “Every immigrant is a friend.”
Last week, the Georgia house gave final approval to a bill to establish a Prosecuting Attorneys Qualifications Commission to help weed out radical candidates. It now heads to the desk of Republican governor Brian Kemp, who is expected to sign it.
At a recent press conference, Athens-Clarke mayor Kelly Girtz brushed off accusations that Athens is a sanctuary city, insisting that crime and illegal immigration are “not connected.”
Asked for comment, Girtz cited a “key research overview” from Stanford University last year, “which found that immigrants are associated with fewer crimes per capita than native-born U.S. residents.”
“Every segment of the population is involved in some crime, but it is important to examine crime rates, rather than simply numbers of crimes,” he added.
While Georgia explicitly forbids sanctuary cities, some localities such as Athens have adopted sanctuary-like status. Although not technically designated as such, Athens was positioned to function at least partially like a sanctuary city under a 2019 resolution passed by its city council.
The resolution directed Athens “to foster a community where individuals and families of all statuses feel safe,” so that “all people, including those WITHOUT documentation, feel welcome and comfortable.”
Taylor and Gonzalez did not respond to request for comment.
All of these elements were working against Laken Riley when she was murdered. Petrea noted that the title of his bill says “report,” not “deport,” as deportation is left to federal authorities. The elephant in the room is that the Biden administration is openly refusing to enforce federal immigration law, ushering in millions of aliens through a dubious parole mechanism instead of detaining them as mandated. This has compounded the chaos for localities, which are left vulnerable to the whims of the derelict Department of Homeland Security.
Petrea, Gaines, and other GOP legislators are trying to implement what they believe to be the bare minimum, to at least stave off more tragedies like Riley’s in Georgia while the border crisis rages on.