(Georgia Recorder) — Legislation that gained momentum in the wake of last week’s killing of Augusta University nursing student Laken Riley to penalize law enforcement agencies that refuse to work with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement pushed through the House on Crossover Day.
House Bill 1105 requires local law enforcement agencies to work in tandem with federal officials to detain people arrested they suspect might be in the country illegally. Under the proposal, if an unauthorized immigrant is in the county jail and is found to be in the United States illegally, the jailer must report the arrest to ICE.
Savannah Republican Rep. Jesse Petrea had been pushing for legislation like this for a year. He filed the bill in January, but the recent murder of Riley who was allegedly killed by Jose Antonio Ibarra, who entered the country illegally, gave the bill and the larger conversations around immigration new momentum.
Petrea said the bill would narrowly focus on people who are here without authorization and who are in the criminal justice system. The bill would also withhold funding from local law enforcement if the agency doesn’t comply with the process. If an officer refuses to enforce these policies, they could be charged with a misdemeanor for the first time refused, and a misdemeanor of a high and aggravated nature for the second time.
Georgia Republican lawmakers claim that law enforcement agencies that do not work in tandem with ICE policies allowed Ibarra to slip through the cracks. Athens Republican Rep. Houston Gaines said that these so-called sanctuary city policies, which he says are similar to the ones Athens has, would be outlawed with this bill. Athens, where the murder took place, chose not to hold people charged with crimes and deemed unauthorized for an extra 48 hours unless a judge ordered it, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Democrats disagree.
“We have had enough of attempts to promote racial profiling and discrimination,” said Duluth Democrat Rep. Pedro Marin.
Multiple House Democrats, most of them people of color, emphasized that the bill would increase racial profiling in their communities.
“There are so many people both in this body and outside of this body who would be suspected as foreign nationals and would be unfairly detained until it was proven they were citizens,” said Duluth Democrat Rep. Ruwa Romman.
The GALEO Impact Fund, an organization focused on Hispanic and Latino representation in public office, condemned the bill in a press release Wednesday for shifting “the blame away from the culprit himself and onto the entire immigrant community.” The advocacy group for Latino issues echoed some of the similar criticisms of policies unfairly targeting the Hispanic community.
Democrats also had a problem with the logistics of the bill. Atlanta Democrat Rep. Stacey Evans said that it would overload law enforcement with sorting out which crimes get processed. Agencies would also have to publish a quarterly report on a public website detailing the number of immigration detainers issued by ICE for inmates at the jail or other information. Evans said that their time would be split between chasing crime on the street and detaining migrants.
“If local law enforcement wants to focus on crime as a whole as opposed to further detaining migrants, I don’t have a problem with that. And I don’t think anybody in here should,” said Evans.
Sandy Springs Democrat Rep. Esther Panitch said a lack of funding would hamper efforts to detain unauthorized immigrants by law enforcement agencies.
The bill was voted nearly along party lines. It got the approval of the House Speaker’s office in a press release and it now goes to the Senate.
“While we continue to pray for Laken Riley and her family, the Georgia House took action today to strengthen public safety and security in our state, stand firmly against illegal immigration and for the rule of law – and I am proud of the passage of House Bill 1105,” House Speaker Jon Burns, a Newington Republican, said in the statement.
