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”
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