Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp said the new immigration law he signed Wednesday in response to the slaying of Laken Riley would improve public safety, but opponents said it would erode trust between immigrant and Latino communities and law enforcement.
Georgia HB1105 requires, among other things, sheriff’s offices to coordinate with federal officials on people in their custody who may be in the country unlawfully, or face losing funding if they don’t.
At the signing event, Kemp, a Republican, said the bill “became one of our top priorities following the senseless death of Laken Riley at the hands of someone in this country illegally who had already been arrested even after crossing the border,” The Associated Press reported.
"If you enter our country illegally and proceed to commit further crime in our communities, we will not allow your crimes to go unanswered," Kemp said.
But advocates said they've already seen attempts to use local officers to enforce immigration law backfire.
The February death of Riley, a 22-year-old nursing student, intensified the already heated election-year political storm over immigration. Police arrested Venezuelan national Jose Antonio Ibarra, an Athens resident, who had been previously arrested in New York for illegal entry in 2022 and again a year later on a charge of acting in a manner to injure a child younger than 17. Authorities said he was released by New York officials before U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement could take him into custody.
Jerry Gonzalez, CEO of GALEO, an Atlanta-based Latino advocacy group, said law enforcement relies on community policing techniques to have "eyes and ears" within the community.
"If there is an erosion of trust between the community and law enforcement, [the community] is no longer going to be calling when they are victims of crime or see a crime," he said.
The law lays out specific requirements for how jail officials should check with ICE to determine whether prisoners are known to be in the country illegally. The law makes it a misdemeanor for jailers to "knowingly and willfully" fail to check immigration status.
The law also mandates that local jails apply to participate in the 287(g) agreement with ICE to let local jailers help enforce immigration law. The program allows local authorities to help in identifying people they arrest who are subject to deportation. President Joe Biden's administration has de-emphasized the program, the AP reported.
When that program was in place in the heavily Latino Cobb and Gwinnett counties, “I was getting calls when a crime was committed rather than the police,” Gonzalez said. Voters in those counties elected sheriffs in 2020 who ended their 287(g) agreement.
Advocacy groups said that while the bill deals with suspects in custody, they fear the enforcement will spill out into local communities because, in some counties, sheriff’s officers are jailers and the local police authority.
"We definitely know it will increase racial profiling," said Dalia Perez, a spokesperson for Georgia Latino Alliance for Human Rights, which opposed the bill as it moved through the Legislature and organized three days of rallies in opposition to the bill's signing.
Groups including the American Civil Liberties Union have said the 287(g) program has led to abuses and civil rights violations.
According to an ACLU report, the program has allowed xenophobic sheriffs and their deputies to detain somebody they suspect of being undocumented under false pretenses to funnel them into deportation.
Gonzalez said GALEO also documented significant racial profiling in Cobb and Gwinnett counties when their sheriff's offices were participating in the 287(g) program.
Immigration attorney Charles Kuck said in a post on X that the law is a "redux" of prior Georgia laws on 287(g), and "actually clarifies how long a non-citizen can be held."
Nonetheless, Gonzalez said his group will be educating members of the community on their rights should they be stopped by local law enforcement.
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