The below retyped letter was sent to the members of the Georgia Public Safety and Homeland Security committee last week in opposition to HB 1105, the “Georgia Criminal Alien Track and Report Act” by the “Project South Institute for the Elimination of Poverty and Genocide.” As an education on the politics of this group, the photo above features Project South’s Legal and Advocacy Director Azadeh Shahshahani at a 2016 street protest against immigration enforcement in Atlanta.
More on Shahshahani here.
The original letter is pasted on the bottom.
“Dear Members of the House Public Safety and Homeland Security Committee,
My name is Priyanka Bhatt and I am a Senior Staff Attorney at a social justice organization called Project South: The Institute for Elimination of Poverty and Genocide. I am writing to urge you to vote NO on HB 1105 for many reasons.
First, the new code section 42-1-14.1 mandates jails to publish a public report about immigrants in their custody. However, many times people in jail are just waiting in pre-trial detention. Therefore, this bill ostracizes and target individuals including people who have merely just been booked and have not actually been convicted of anything thus creating a skewed number in the report published.
Second, booking officers in jails are not immigration agents. These officers have absolutely no training in immigration. Therefore, mandating them to be an enforcement arm for The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) will not only create more work and liability for them, but it will also increase racial profiling in jail since officers will now have to identify who might be a “foreign national”.
Third, this bill mandates jails to hold individuals for DHS for up to 48 hours even if they otherwise would have been released. There are some courts that have found that to be a violation of the Fourth Amendment because detaining an individual after they could have been release would constitute as a new arrest where you would need probable cause.
Lastly, this bill also targets U.S. Citizens. 42-1-11.4 mandates the Department of Corrections to also publish public information on individuals who are citizens of this country but also happen to be citizens of another country. It does not matter if you are a citizen or not, this bill targets you simply because you are an immigrant. This shows the true interest of this bill: to further increase anti-immigrant hatred in the state of Georgia.
For all these reasons, I urge you to vote no on this bill.
Sincerely,
Priyanka Bhatt, Esq.
Project South
Senior Staff Attorney”
—
By D.A. King
There below post is a copy of a letter to the editor published today in the Middle Georgia Houston Home Journal . There is a paywall. We are grateful to Mr. Trent for sending his letter along and for the kind words.
“I can’t help but wonder if Laken Riley’s family knows about Sen. Walker’s measure.”
April 17, 2024
Dear editor,
I write in regard to the guest column your newspaper published Saturday from Mr. D.A. King and the legislation sponsored by Sen. Larry Walker passed by the GOP-controlled General Assembly. I thank you for running the accurate and wisely written column. King is an expert. I too recommend that Gov. Kemp veto SB 354.
I hope readers and conservative voters in Middle Georgia recognize the fact while the Republican lawmakers were proudly boasting of passage of HB 1105 aimed criminal illegals and sanctuary policies, they also passed Walker’s SB 354 which is a literal written invitation to illegal aliens to come to Georgia. The irresponsible quest for more workers and more business in Georgia at any cost has gone over the top of the lunacy mark.
Inviting more illegals will produce more crime and needless misery for Georgians. I can’t help but wonder if Laken Riley’s family knows about Sen. Walker’s measure.
As a retired Senior Special Agent of the former Immigration and Naturalization Service (USINS) I have spent most of my life fighting the fully avoidable crime created by illegal immigration. I served on metropolitan area drug, and organized crime task forces for many years and have supervised special agents assigned to the Joint Terrorism Task Force. In addition, I spent ten years as a uniformed Border Patrol agent assigned to both the northern and southern borders.
My final assignment was as the Assistant Director, Enforcement Training, U.S. Immigration Officer Academy, Federal Law Enforcement Training Center, Glynco, GA.
Trusting voters should be reminded that as ‘candidate Kemp’ in 2018 our governor promised to focus on illegal immigration in Georgia and to end the already illegal sanctuary policies that some jailers have created. Having closely watched Gov. Kemp, I can say with great disgust that he has done nothing since then about our very real illegal immigration problem in Georgia.
If SB 354 becomes law, it will lead to more bills that further dismantle the system in place to discourage illegal immigration in Georgia.
Not many Republican voters want Georgia to be “a great place for illegals to live, work and raise a family.” But Nobody should be surprised if Gov. Kemp proudly signs Walker’s dangerous bill into law while assuring us that it’s “good for business.”
Robert Trent
St. Mary’s
Contact info for the Georgia delegation in Washington DC here. Just click on their name.
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