Rules of collaboration are emerging between ICE and Georgia's keepers of the peace: county sheriffs

Caption

The Irwin County Detention Center as seen in Ocilla, Ga., in 2020 when the county jail was both a county jail and an immigration detention center.

Credit: Grant Blankenship/GPB News

As the Trump administration ramps up immigration enforcement nationally, sheriff’s offices in Georgia are slowly doing the same as mandated by a state law passed last year.

Georgia’s House Bill 1105 requires local law enforcement to tell federal officials when they have someone without legal status in their jail and, when they can, transport those people to immigration detention.

But so far, the idea that local law enforcement could perform immigration roundups in place of Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers appears to be unfounded.

That’s based on the handful of official agreements between ICE and local agencies under HB 1105. 

“You know, we've got gangsters and folks shooting up houses and doing things like that. That's going to occupy our time right now. If I've got a person that’s hardworking, whether they're illegal or not, and they're not breaking the law and not getting on our radar, then then they're not going to be bothered by us,” said Bibb County Sheriff David Davis. 

That’s because Davis’ plans to work with ICE are generally like those described in those other agreements under HB 1105: Only deputies in jails will be trained to have ICE arrest powers and they will only make immigration arrests of people who landed in jail because of a local criminal charge.

That’s true for counties which had longstanding relationships with ICE before state legislators mandated them, too. The Whitfield County Sheriff’s Office appears alone in having a spot on their website where they explain their relationship with ICE which they have had since 2008.

“This program is not a means of arresting individuals in public for alleged violations of immigration law.  Instead, this program operates based on a series of reviews and background checks completed only after an inmate is already arrested for an Offense under Georgia Law,” reads the web page, echoing the other agreements under HB 1105.

Whitfield County has also taken the further step of publishing quarterly reports about their compliance with HB 1105. 

Bibb County Sheriff David Davis’s office is one of 15 departments on record with the Georgia Department of Audits and Accounts as having come to an agreement with ICE. He described what looks like the boilerplate arrangement, which he says is not a fundamental change for his office.

“It’s sort of a distinction without a difference, because if there is an immigration issue and ICE or Homeland Security, whoever, has said, ‘We want this person, put a detainer on them,’ well, we're going to do that anyway,” Davis said.

Detainers are the requests made by ICE to local law enforcement to hold someone in a local jail for transfer of custody to ICE. The agency has 48 hours to act on a detainer and after those 2 days the person must be released. Sheriff Davis said one problem in the past has been ICE letting that clock run out on their own detainers. 

Meanwhile, Davis’ jail is usually over 100% capacity. In a December 2024 report on county jail populations published by the Georgia Sheriff’s Association about a third of jails were at or near capacity. 

That’s why Davis said he doesn’t imagine many sheriffs will agree to let their jails be used as long-term immigration detention sites. There’s just not enough space. Plus, he said his deputies don’t have time to make up flimsy charges just to pursue what is really an immigration arrest.  

“You know, we're not going to do any kind of pretextual situations like that,” Davis said. 

So far ICE hasn’t asked Davis for help in any large-scale raid. But if they did, he said he would be bound to follow their lead and help, just as he has in the past for federal agencies like the FBI for things like serving stacks of arrest warrants in drug or racketeering cases.