Hand delivered to Gov Brian Kemp's Capitol office August 1, 2022: Request for investigation and prosecution: Gwinnett County Sheriff Keybo Taylor & Cobb County Sheriff Craig Owens - OCGA 42-4-14

I hand delivered a paper copy of the below letter to a legal department staffer in Gov Kemp’s Capitol office today at 1:58PM. I have embedded links here not in the hard copy to educate the online reader. I also corrected two typos and *an omission in the below version. Update Aug 3: **I corrected the copy below on open records request in Gwinnett until I locate misplaced files.

***Update, August 16: Unable to locate misplaced Gwinnett files, I sent two additional open records requests to Gwinnett Sheriff Keybo Taylor and have received responses to both. The charges on the foreign born subjects the newest responses are not felonies, so I have added corrective language below. The new responses do not indicate that Sheriff Taylor is in compliance with state law, OCGA 42-4-14.

**** Typo corrected: (missing words).

My apologies for the typos.

Note: On *August 2 & 3, I sent the below letter to virtually all MSM news outlets in Atlanta and many in Georgia as well as several national outlets including the Atlanta Journal Constitution and the Associated Press. I will list all of those outlets here as time allows.
Sept. 6, 2022 – we filed OIG complaints against Gov.Kemp, Sheriff Taylor and Sheriff Owens today, here.

1 August 2022

Governor Brian Kemp

206 Washington Street, 111 state Capitol

Atlanta, GA 30334

Re: Complaint and request for investigation; Gwinnett and Cobb County sheriff’s public admission of violation, OCGA 42-4-14: “criminal illegals” and illegal sanctuary policies.

Dear Governor Kemp,

As you are Georgia’s chief law enforcement officer I write to your office as instructed by the GBI on how a private citizen can report violations of state law and request an investigation.

You may remember the 2006 passage of SB 529, the “Georgia Security and Immigration Compliance Act” as you served as Chairman of the state Senate Public Safety Committee that held hearings on the legislation and passed it out. You also voted in favor of final passage of the bill on the Senate floor. Part of that legislation, which is now law, contained language that created OCGA 42-4-14. Paragraph (c) of that law now reads:

“When any foreign national is confined, for any period, in a county or municipal jail, a reasonable effort shall be made to verify that such foreign national has been lawfully admitted to the United States and if lawfully admitted, that such lawful status has not expired. If verification of lawful status cannot be made from documents in the possession of the foreign national, verification shall be made within 48 hours through a query to the Law Enforcement Support Center (LESC) of the United States Department of Homeland Security or other office or agency designated by the federal government. If the foreign national is determined to be an illegal alien, the keeper of the jail or other officer shall notify the United States Department of Homeland Security, or other office or agency designated for notification by the federal government.” (bold emphasis mine).

Gwinnett Sheriff Keybo Taylor has been quoted by various national and Georgia news outlets as saying he will not and does not check immigration status of incoming prisoners in the county jail and will not report criminal illegal aliens to federal immigration authorities.

“What we will not be doing is notifying ICE of anybody’s immigration status in the jail or any of our facilities” – Sheriff Keybo Taylor, as quoted by the Associated Press, January 1, 2021 (‘Sheriff pulls out of controversial immigration program’) is one example.

Then Sheriff-elect Taylor’s statement to Fox5 investigative reporter Randy Travis in a November 13, 2020 interview is another example of what is clearly a confession of his intent to violate state law, OCGA 42-4-14.

“We will not be participating with, uh, ICE or any other agencies in regards to immigration issues” (‘New Gwinnett sheriff plans two big changes first day of office’ – WAGA TV News).

I have received responses to ~~(an)~~ **multiple open records requests that validate the fact that Sheriff Taylor has been faithful to his promises on this matter and is in fact in open violation. Sheriff Taylor’s responses to my open records requests for copies of records and documents that would illustrate a check with law enforcement data systems on immigration status of foreign nationals in custody do not include these records. Neither is there any evidence that Sheriff Taylor has reported “criminal illegals” to federal immigration enforcement authorities in the responses to my query that includes multiple inmates.

Please also note that the “headline” or “catch phrase” included on the LexisNexis version of this state law that includes the words “charged with felony” is inaccurate. Since being amended in 2011’s HB 87, the mandated immigration status check applies to all (*foreign national) inmates, regardless of the charge. I have been working with the Office of Legislative Counsel to see the online description of the law’s contents corrected for nearly two years. I would be grateful if you would use your power and authority to speed along the needed corrections.

*** All of my open records requests (except the two newest Gwinnett examples) pertain to foreign born inmates charged with felonies.

Please note that with the assistance of retired and experienced senior federal immigration enforcement officers, I have spent considerable time and effort on careful investigation of my own on this matter for more than a year. Responses to open records requests from the Cobb County jail show the same absence of records that would show compliance with the state law I cite in this letter. Sheriff Craig Owens runs the Cobb County jail.

As further evidence of open defiance of the law you are sworn to enforce, the Atlanta Journal Constitution ran a story citing both sheriffs in January of this year in which the newspaper reported:

“With 287(g) no longer in force, local jail officials have stopped systemically checking the immigration status of individuals arrested for a variety of crimes – including minor traffic violations – and sharing that information with immigration officials to initiate deportation proceedings” (‘There’s less fear’: Metro Atlanta immigrants feel safer with new sheriffs’ – AJC January 24, 2022).

I have posted all of my evidence online and am in the process of consolidating the various posts into a single source of information on the above facts.

As your office notes on the official website, “The governor is the chief executive of the state and oversees the executive branch. The governor shall “take care that the laws are faithfully executed and shall be the conservator of the peace” in the state. This power to enforce laws is almost identical to that of the president of the United States.”

Innocent Georgians – including children – are being killed, raped and molested by the “criminal illegals” and the illegal “sanctuary city”/county policies you promised to address when you ran for governor in 2018. Georgia is home to more illegal aliens than Arizona in large part because of (****the lack of enforcement) the many laws aimed at deterrence of that organized crime are ignored here in our state.

I respectfully urge you to fulfill your duty and your pledge on this urgent public safety issue immediately.

Please feel free to contact me at any time for further information. I plan to distribute this request.

D.A. King

President, The Dustin Inman Society

Marietta, GA.

Center for Immigration Studies

DREAMers’ are just the bait; “citizenship for all 11 million, or however many” illegal aliens there are here is the hoo

By Andrew R. Arthur on November 17, 2022

On November 16, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) held a press conference in front of the Capitol in which he called for amnesty for “DREAMers”, aliens brought illegally to the United States as children. As he did so, however, he pulled back the curtain on his end game – to “get a path to citizenship for all 11 million, or however many undocumented, there are here”. The DREAMers are the bait, while a full and total amnesty is the hook.

DREAMers, In Brief. Amnesty legislation for aliens who arrived in their youth has a long, but not particularly successful pedigree. Here’s a brief recap.

In August 2001, then-Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) introduced a bipartisan “DREAM Act”, which included 18 cosponsors. That bill would have granted amnesty to aliens unlawfully present for five years who entered under the age of 21, and who met certain work and educational requirements.

The timing of that bill could not have been worse, because less than six weeks later, the September 11 attacks showed how foolhardy such blanket amnesties were. Nonetheless, similar “DREAM Acts” were subsequently introduced in later Congresses.

One bears special note. In March 2009, Sen. Richard Durbin (D-Ill.) offered up the “DREAM Act of 2009” during the 111th Congress.

At that time, Barack Obama was president, Democrats held an overwhelming majority in the House, and from September 24, 2009 (when Democrat Paul Kirk was appointed to fill the seat of the late Democratic Massachusetts Sen. Ted Kennedy) through February 4, 2010 (when Republican Scott Brown was elected to fill Kennedy’s seat), Democrats held a filibuster-proof majority of 60 seats in the Senate.

Obama’s fellow Democrats could have passed any bill they wanted – including and in particular the DREAM Act of 2009 – without any Republican votes at all. But that bill went nowhere. Cosponsor and then-Senate Judiciary Chairman Pat Leahy (D-Vt.) did not even bring it up for a vote in committee.

That said, two Republican senators – Mel Martinez (R-Fla.) and Richard Lugar (R-Ind.) – were cosponsors of the DREAM Act of 2009, so they probably would have blocked a filibuster even during the months Democrats only controlled a measly 59 seats in the upper chamber.

Obama blamed Republicans for the failure to pass a DREAM Act, but the fault really lies with him and congressional Democrats alone – DREAM Act legislation simply was not a priority for a party that held a hammerlock on the legislative process.

The popularity of legislation to “protect” the DACA population has been a key talking point for years (I was the punching boy for Democrats at a House hearing on the issue in March 2019), but let’s face it – if it really were all that popular, it would have been a shoo-in in the 111th Congress.

DACA. The failure of DREAM Act legislation led to a program called “Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals” or DACA. It grants quasi-legal status to aliens who entered the United States while under the age of 16 before June 15, 2007, who are currently under the age of 41, who meet certain educational standards, and have not been convicted of certain crimes.

DACA was not created by Congress, or even by executive order or executive action (for what that is worth). It’s the product of a memo issued by then-DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano on June 15, 2012. In my considered legal opinion, Napolitano lacked the authority to create DACA (the Fifth Circuit ruled in October that the program is unlawful, but the Supreme Court has yet to weigh in), but in any event, it sets a bad precedent.

Want proof? Here’s what the editorial board of the Washington Post had to say when President Obama was considering expanding DACA to include parents of U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents in 2014:

The president should think twice. Some of the same Democrats and pro-immigrant advocates urging him to protect millions of undocumented immigrants from deportation would be outraged if a Republican president took a similarly selective approach to enforcing the laws — say, those that guarantee voting rights or prohibit employment discrimination.

Obama ignored the Post editorial board and created something called Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents (DAPA). DAPA proved to be a bridge too far for Texas and several other states, who successfully sued to block its implementation.

Despite all of this, DACA continues, and the Biden administration recently issued a new rule, effective October 31, “to preserve and fortify” the decade-old program.

A Sympathetic Population. The DACA population is admittedly sympathetic. The vast majority of the approximately 650,000 current DACA beneficiaries were removable a decade ago, but in the intervening years they have been living in a quasi-legal status thanks to some questionable administrative actions.

Even President Trump, in his 2018 State of the Union address, offered up a plan to legalize not just DACA recipients but also a total of 1.8 million “DACA-eligible” aliens – more or less the same individuals covered by the DREAM Act…. please read the rest here at the CIS website.