The Georgia House has passed a bill aimed at cracking down on illegal aliens who have committed crimes in the state. But the bill’s passage has brought with it claims that the legislation requires police to arrest “immigrants” and that it perpetuates harmful stereotypes about them.
“Georgia House passes bill requiring police to help arrest immigrants after student’s killing,” The Associated Press originally reported on Feb. 29. The piece’s headline was later corrected to read, “Georgia House passes bill requiring jailers to identify and hold immigrants after student’s killing.”
Claims have also been made that the bill would “violate constitutional freedoms, ignore the needs of local communities, and perpetuate harmful stereotypes about Latinos and immigrants,” according to a statement from the Georgia Association of Latino Elected Officials reported on by Fox 5 Atlanta.
Georgia Republican state Rep. Jesse Petrea sponsored the bill and has sought to set the record straight as to what the legislation does and does not do.
“The media inaccuracy to date has been to suggest the bill speaks to broader policing and arrests outside of jails,” Petrea told The Daily Signal in an email, adding, “That’s not the case.”
“The bill requires that when a criminal is jailed for a crime in Georgia and determined to be illegally in the country, they must be reported to federal immigration authorities,” the state lawmaker explained. “If not, the sheriff/ jailer will have committed a misdemeanor.”
Once Immigration and Customs Enforcement is notified and if the agency requests the sheriff or jailer to hold the illegal alien, then the detainer “must be honored,” Petrea said. “Those are 48-hour holds,” he added.
Petrea also made it clear that the bill was not introduced because of Laken Riley’s murder in February. The bill was first drafted about a year ago and introduced in the Georgia House in January, according to the lawmaker.
Riley, a University of Georgia nursing student, was murdered on Feb. 22 while out for a jog on her college campus. Jose Ibarra, an illegal alien from Venezuela, is the lead suspect in Riley’s murder. Ibarra was previously arrested in New York in 2023 on charges of child endangerment but was released before U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement could ask local law enforcement to hold him.
Riley’s murder thrust the Georgia bill, called the Georgia Criminal Alien Track and Report Act, into the spotlight.
A careful read of the text of the 10-page bill confirms that jailers are not allowed to hold an illegal alien unless the Department of Homeland Security’s Law Enforcement Support Center or ICE “specifically provides written instructions for detaining such inmate as an illegal alien.”
“This bill just ends any ‘sanctuary’ policies in Georgia and simply requires local law enforcement to report whether the people they have arrested, or have in custody, are American citizens or aliens,” Simon Hankinson, a senior research fellow at The Heritage Foundation’s Border Security and Immigration Center, told The Daily Signal. (The Daily Signal is the news outlet of Heritage.)
The bill is now under consideration in the Georgia Senate.
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