Georgia Today: MARTA CEO resigns; Georgia woman detained twice by ICE despite citizenship claim

Peter Biello: Welcome to the Georgia Today podcast. Here we bring you the latest reports from the GPB newsroom. On today's episode, the Canadian CEO of Atlanta's public transportation system resigns over an immigration problem. Marietta installs vape detectors in the district's public schools and the story of a Georgia woman who has been detained by ICE twice, despite her claim that she was born American.

Alma Bowman: I kept trying to tell them when I was in court that, hey, my dad is an American citizen, you know? And it's just like one ear and out the other.

Peter Biello: Today is Thursday, July 17. I'm Peter Biello, and this is Georgia Today.

Story 1:

Peter Biello: 24 states are suing the Trump administration to release $6 billion in promised federal education grants. GPB's Sarah Kallis reports Georgia is not one of them.

Sarah Kallis: Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr says the state will not join the suit. He said, quote, "the president has the authority to ensure that these funds are being spent lawfully." The suit argues withholding the funds violates the Impoundment Act, governing how a president withholds funding. Meanwhile, U.S. Representative and Democrat Lucy McBath called for the release of the funds on the House floor Tuesday.

Lucy McBath: Instead of being in your child's classroom, your money is sitting in Washington here because the Secretary of Education could not be bothered to meet a deadline that is the difference between a school having an after-school program or not.

Sarah Kallis: Georgia school districts were supposed to receive around $40 million from the U.S. Department of Education July 1 to pay for programs, including after-school programs. For GPB News, I'm Sarah Kallis.

Caption

Alma Bowman (left and second from right) poses in a pair of compiled pictures with her children (from left) Chris and John Mitchell. Bowman, a Middle Georgia resident who's been in the U.S. since age 10, remains detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement since March 2025.

Credit: Courtesy of John Mitchell

Story 2:

Peter Biello: President Trump was reelected largely because of his promise to enforce the nation's immigration laws, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement is detaining all kinds of people. In Georgia, that includes a woman named Alma Bowman, who has been detained by ICE twice in her life, despite her claim that she was born American. GPB's Grant Blankenship explains.

Grant Blankenship: Alma Bowman's kids, John and Chris Mitchell, still live in the same place Alma graduated high school, Jones County, in Central Georgia. And so I've come to John's home to learn more about Alma's story, but not long after we start talking, John gets a call —

Grant (from interview): That sounds important.

Grant Blankenship: — From his mom.

John Mitchell: It is her. I'll see if she would like to say anything to you.

Grant (from interview): Yeah, I'd love to.

John Mitchell: Give me one quick sec.

Grant Blankenship: She's calling from the ICE Stewart Detention Center in South Georgia. She's been there for over four months.

John Mitchell: I'm doing pretty good. We're currently doing an interview.

Grant Blankenship: And after I press my mic up against John's phone, Alma says neither this detention nor her first one eight years ago are anything she ever imagined happening.

Alma Bowman: My father is an American citizen. He's my father. So that's all I know.

Grant Blankenship: John Mitchell says what his mom thought she knew and what the federal government says they know first came into conflict in 2017 in Cobb County.

John Mitchell: It was a regular traffic stop.

Grant Blankenship: Alma got pulled over.

John Mitchell: They ran her records and stuff and saw that she had — she had a record.

Grant Blankenship: A non-violent criminal record for which she'd already served time. But Cobb County had a so-called 287(g) agreement with ICE. And so when Alma's name came back as someone with legal permanent resident status or a green card, ICE asked the county to hold Alma for them. And during the detention that followed, Alma says she tried to tell immigration officials there's no way this should happen.

Alma Bowman: I kept trying to tell them when I was in court that, "Hey, my dad is an American citizen," you know, and it's just like one ear and out the other.

Grant Blankenship: For three years. The reason Alma was so convinced she was a citizen when the government wasn't is both really simple and kind of complicated. First, her dad was an American. Lawrence Bowman was born and raised in Illinois. He was also a sailor in the U.S. Navy in the 1960s. That's how we met Alma's mom, Lolita Katarungan, in the city of Manila in the Philippines. The Philippines had actually been a part the United States, a U.S. colony, when Alma's mom was born. After independence, the U.S. maintained a military presence in the Philippines. That's why Lawrence Bowman was there in the 1960s. And so Alma says when he left the Navy —

Alma Bowman: He went back with my mom to the USA just to finish college so he can get a house and a job before they come and got me.

Grant Blankenship: Which they did when Alma was 10.

Grant (from interview): And what did your dad ever say to you about the paperwork or the legal stuff that had to happen for you to be able to do that, to come move to the States finally?

Alma Bowman: He never really mentioned anything.

Grant (from interview): I guess you just assume a dad's gonna take care of that kind of thing, right?

Alma Bowman: Right, of course. I was only 10.

Grant (from interview): Samantha Hamilton is a staff attorney with Asian Americans Advancing Justice, and she represents Alma. And she says that's the story she had to tell as she bounced around ICE facilities acting as her own lawyer.

Samantha Hamilton: She was getting up in front of that immigration judge and, you know, giving it her best shot. I mean, what else could she do?

Grant Blankenship: Alma won her own release from detention. She and Samantha met after that and are still working on Alma's immigration case. Samantha says there's stories like Alma's pretty much anywhere the U.S. military has bases in a foreign country.

Samantha Hamilton: A lot of those servicemen have had children with local women in these other countries and their children should be considered American citizens. I mean, they are American citizens!

Grant Blankenship: Rose Quison Villasor agrees. She's a law professor at Rutgers University where she directs the School Center for Immigrant Justice. She says Alma should be a U.S. citizen under a very old law.

Rose Quison Villasor: Passed by Congress since 1790.

Grant Blankenship: The Immigration and Naturalization Act says:

Rose Quison Villasor: That if a U.S. citizen has a child that's born abroad, that child derives citizenship, acquires citizenship through the parents own U.S. citizenship.

Grant Blankenship: The law only applied to white people until five years after the Civil War. It was extended to some people of Asian descent in the 1940s. Rose says for most of the nation's history, though, it didn't take a ton of documentation to claim an overseas-born child's U.S. citizenship. She says things changed when the U.S. put those military bases in countries—

Rose Quison Villasor:  —whose population were primarily people of color.

Grant Blankenship: Like the Philippines, Vietnam, Japan, South Korea. Congress passed the Amerasian Homecoming Act in the 1980s to ease immigration for kids from some of these countries, but not from the Philippines. Alma's parents are dead now. But still, attorney Samantha Hamilton says if it's proof the government wants, Alma has it.

Samantha Hamilton: We've got her birth certificate.

Grant (from interview): Why is that not enough for the federal government?

Samantha Hamilton: They are saying that she needs to establish a blood relationship between herself and Lawrence Bowman.

Grant (from interview): So how would we even do that?

Samantha Hamilton: By exhuming his body and spending $30,000.

Grant Blankenship: To compare their DNA. Rose Quison-Vilasor says that's not unheard of. She had a client who compared their DNA to their exhumed dad's.

Rose Quison Villasor: Then they were able to then do a DNA test to prove 99% relationship between the father and my client.

Grant Blankenship: Today, the U.S. State Department policy is that genetic proof a U.S. citizen is the parent of a foreign born child is mandatory to transfer citizenship to the child, but that even a 99.5% DNA match is no guarantee. From 2020 to 2024, Alma lived a normal life at home. In two months after Trump's second inauguration, at her annual in-person immigration check-in, ICE took her again.

Alma Bowman: So we went downstairs, it just went straight out of the elevator, straight through the outside into an SUV, straight to here.

Grant Blankenship: To the Stewart Detention Center. If Alma is deported, it would likely be to the Philippines. But Samantha Hamilton says that country won't claim her, either.

Samantha Hamilton: The Filipino government has recently sent a letter to Alma saying that in their opinion, her birth certificate does not indicate that she is a Filipino citizen. I think she's an American citizen. In the alternative, I think that she might be stateless. A person of no... a person under no flag!

Grant Blankenship: Meanwhile, Alma's daughter, Chris Mitchell, says her mom's trying to reconnect with relatives in the Philippines, just in case.

Chris Mitchell: No, we don't have family in the philippines. There's no, like, she's mentioned her aunt, we don't know them, she doesn't know them anymore. There's nothing there.

Grant Blankenship: Mitchell says for her mother Alma Bowman, her family and her life....

John Mitchell: I love you, mom.

Grant Blankenship: ...Have always been in the United States. For GPB News, I'm Grant Blankenship.

Story 3:

Peter Biello: The General Manager and CEO of Metro Atlanta's Regional Transit Agency has resigned. Collie Greenwood has led MARTA since 2022. His departure has something to do with his immigration status. He's Canadian. But details were not shared during a board meeting when his departure was announced a few hours ago. Jennifer Ide chairs the MARTA board.

Jennifer Ide: It is very unfortunate that immigration is a very complicated issue in the United States today. But Mr. Greenwood needed to make the decision that was best for him and his family and his MARTA family will miss him tremendously.

Story 4:

Peter Biello: Earlier in the day, MARTA officials provided an update on a Monday stampede that injured people on an escalator at a MARTA train station after a Beyoncé concert. GPB's Amanda Andrews has that story.

Amanda Andrews: The Metro Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority says the escalator at the Vine City station remains barricaded. State inspection confirms maintenance was performed on it last week. After the concert, extra staff members were in place to manage the crowd entering the station, but not at the escalators. Rhonda Allen is with MARTA. She says they'll be more aggressive about staffing going forward.

Rhonda Allen: Our escalators, really, we ask that we use when we're metering one person per step. And that is not what happened with the group of people trying to come down the escalator. The escalator was overloaded beyond its design capacity.

Amanda Andrews: MARTA also saw a 25% increase in ridership compared to the last Beyoncé concert two years ago. For GPB News, I'm Amanda Andrews.

Story 5:

Peter Biello: More than 150 people gathered in Athens for a protest to commemorate the late congressman John Lewis today. WUGA's Emma Auer has more on one of the many events being held across the state.

Emma Auer: The protest was one of several nationwide as part of the "Good Trouble Lives On" national day of action. It borrowed from the famous words of late Georgia congressman and civil rights icon, John Lewis, who died in 2020. Protester Gloria Heard joined the crowd for one reason.

Gloria Heard: For good trouble.

Emma Auer: The protesters lined a busy commercial corridor with posters critical of President Donald Trump's administration. Michael Call said he wanted to attend the event to honor Congressman Lewis.

Michael Call: I was a little boy when I first saw him, you know, and the way that he spoke, it inspired me to always keep up the fight. Having him as that leader made me want to do more and continue to do more.

Emma Auer: No counter protesters attended the event. For WUGA News, I'm Emma Auer.

Story 6:

Peter Biello: Gov. Brian Kemp has appointed a new justice to the state's Supreme Court. Judge Benjamin Land was named to fill the seat vacated by former Chief Justice Michael Boggs, who stepped down in March. Land has served on Georgia's Court of Appeals since July 2022, and was previously a superior court judge. Kemp praised Land's fairness, work ethic, and integrity in a statement. Before becoming a judge, Land practiced law for about 26 years, focusing on civil litigation in Columbus.

Story 7:

Peter Biello: President Donald Trump says that Coca-Cola had agreed to use real cane sugar in its flagship soft drink in the U.S. at his suggestion. The switch from high fructose corn syrup in Coke sold in the United States would put Coca-Cola in line with its practice in other countries, including Mexico. Trump called the change a quote, "very good move," but the Atlanta-based Coca-Cola company didn't confirm the move, saying only that it appreciated Trump's enthusiasm while promising that more details on offerings within its products would be shared soon.

Story 8:

Peter Biello: Homeowners across Georgia are paying more than ever to protect their properties and new data shows those costs are only climbing. According to Lending Tree's State of Home Insurance report, the average cost of home insurance in Georgia is now more than $3,200 a year. That's well above the national average of $2,800, and that's up more than 35% since 2019. Experts say a mix of rising construction costs, inflation, and more frequent natural disasters are driving insurers to raise premiums.

Story 9:

Peter Biello: Three people who went missing while swimming at the Amerson River Park in Macon on Tuesday evening have been found dead. That's according to Bibb County Coroner Leon Jones. The victims include 7-year-old Summer Lewis, her 10-year-old sister Skylar Worthen and 28-year-old Johnny Collins III, a local DJ known as Young. Family members say Collins was the boyfriend of the girl's mother. Officials say the three went under and did not resurface around 7.30 p.m. Tuesday, prompting someone to call 911. A dive team from the Macon Bibb County Fire Department recovered their bodies yesterday. Relatives told The Macon Telegraph the victims were wearing life jackets.

Story 10:

Peter Biello: The Marietta School Board voted to install vape detectors in the bathrooms of middle and high schools in the district. The devices look like smoke detectors, but sense chemicals emitted from vape instead of smoke and send a silent alarm to school administrators. Marietta School District Chief Communications Officer Chris Fiore says the district plans to install the detectors before the start of the school year.

Chris Fiore: Our No. 1 priority is student safety, right? And this is a part of that, making sure that our kids can come to school and learn in a safe place, that they can go to the restroom and not have to be worried about someone else vaping in there.

Peter Biello: The Marietta School District paid for the devices, in part with money received from a settlement reached in 2022 between e-cigarette manufacturer Juul and 34 states. Georgia was allocated $19 million in the settlement.

Story 11:

Peter Biello: A new airline is coming to Middle Georgia Regional Airport. Spirit Airlines will offer nonstop flights from Macon to Fort Lauderdale. Doug Faour is the airport's aviation director. He says it's part of an effort to bring customers back to the airport.

Doug Faour: We're taking baby steps to rebuild this and make a solid foundation, but the next step was an affordable carrier going to a destination that was popular for the residents of Macon.

Peter Biello: It's Spirit Airlines' third destination to Georgia, after Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport and Savannah-Hilton Head International Airport.

Story 12:

Peter Biello: Electric automaker Rivian plans to open an East Coast headquarters in Atlanta. The California-based company said today the office will employ 100 people by the end of the year, with 500 people eventually working there as it ramps up operations at its Georgia manufacturing site. Rivian plan to employ more than 7,000 people at a factory near Social Circle, about 45 miles east of Atlanta. Its Atlanta headquarters will occupy the top floors of an already-built office on the city's popular bike and pedestrian trail, the Beltline, in the city's old Fourth Ward neighborhood.

Story 13:

Peter Biello: The number of jobs in Georgia topped 5 million for the first time ever. The Georgia Department of Labor today announced the number of jobs rose in June by about 9,000 to the new record. The state's unemployment rate remained unchanged from May at 3.5%. Job gains were highest in health care and social assistance and arts, entertainment, and recreation. Jobs declines were highest in manufacturing and state government.

And that's it for this edition of Georgia Today. Thank you so much for tuning in. If you wanna learn more about any of these stories, check GPB.org/news. And make sure you subscribe to this podcast so we will pop up in your feed automatically tomorrow. And if you've got feedback, send it our way by email. The address is GeorgiaToday@GPB.org. I'm Peter Biello. Thanks again for listening. We'll see you tomorrow.

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For more on these stories and more, go to GPB.org/news