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Moultrie, Ga., in Colquitt County, sits about an hour and a half from the Florida border. It's an agricultural town with a significant population of migrant workers.
Credit: Sofi Gratas/GPB News
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South Georgia ICE arrests reveal a new reality of immigration enforcement
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The second Trump administration marks a shift in how people without legal U.S. immigration status are arrested. in many places, local law enforcement officers are making the arrests. GPB's Sofi Gratas has more from one community in South Georgia experiencing this new norm.
Lorenzo Sarabia Morales’s home is at the end of a gravel road in Moultrie, in South Georgia’s Colquitt County.
On a night at the end of July, the stifling heat wave outside didn’t stop his son and other neighborhood kids from playing soccer. In the house, the family’s window AC unit was blasting.
Sarabia Morales had only recently returned home from Stewart Detention Center, over 100 miles away. He was arrested on May 12 by a Colquitt County deputy from the sheriff’s office for driving without a license and failing to maintain a lane. Records from the Colquitt County Sheriff’s Office indicate he was then detained for Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
A parent to three young children, Sarabia Morales spent Father’s Day at Stewart Detention Center.
“They gave us a Coke and some M&M chocolates,” he said. “We don't know who sent it, but they said it was from the government.”
He was one of 12 people to be arrested and detained on May 12, during an operation organized by the Department of Homeland Security. According to a statement from the Colquitt County Sheriff’s Office, DHS had asked Colquitt County to help arrest local people with outstanding warrants.
That did happen. But when word got out that ICE was in town, the operation expanded beyond the warrant service, into a joint patrol by DHS and local police, according to the statement.
Alongside people apprehended on drug possession charges and a probation violation were others with no previous criminal charges, including Sarabia Morales.
“I was working like 30 minutes from here,” Sarabia Morales said. His wife called and said she heard there was an immigration raid going on. “And I stopped doing what I was doing. I came home together with another person. That person is also from Veracruz [Mexico]. That day, there were eight minutes left to get here.”
But neither he nor his passenger, Abraham Mendez Luna, would arrive home. They were taken to the Colquitt County Jail and fingerprinted, their identities checked through a federal database that informed deputies they did not have legal immigration status.
What happened to Lorenzo is one result of two laws.
There's Georgia's HB 1105, which requires county sheriffs to fully comply with federal immigration law or face criminal charges. The law was passed in May of last year.
RELATED: Rules of collaboration are emerging between ICE and Georgia's keepers of the peace: county sheriffs
Then there's a section of the federal Immigration and Nationality Act called 287(g). It gives local police the option to receive training from ICE to make arrests themselves.
According to ICE records, neither the Colquitt County Sheriff’s Office nor the Moultrie Police Department had such training before the May 12 joint patrol.
Sarabia Morales said he was told as much.
“Here, we are not ICE,” Sarabia Morales recalled from a conversation with a deputy after his arrest. “Here, we are just a detention center.”
A CHANGE IN POLICY AND ACTION
This all marks a change in how Alma Young with the United Farm Workers Foundation has understood the rules of immigration enforcement in Georgia.
When Sarabia Morales was arrested, the United Farm Workers made a social media post asking for help. Posts for other farm workers detained by ICE elsewhere in the country fill other squares on the organization’s grid.
The agriculture industry has been hit hard by immigration enforcement, while President Donald Trump has sent mixed messages on where he stands.
Young said “Know Your Rights” campaigns have long been the strategy during times like this. Those rights used to fit on a little red card.
“The red card says ‘Don't open the door,’ ‘Don't answer any questions,’ ‘Don't sign anything,’” Young said.
But then came the May 12 arrests, the first major act of immigration enforcement on the Latino community in Moultrie.
“They were expecting to see ICE badges, ICE agents, but we're seeing local police,” Young said. “Immediately we were like, ‘OK, we need to provide a different type of education’ because even though these are our rights ... we're following it, but they're not.”
The community mainly engages with each other through encrypted chats now, keeping tabs on suspected ICE activity and notifying their neighbors when they hear of a raid nearby.
If people were scared of local police before, the May 12 arrests only deepened their distrust, said Dora Garcia, a Colquitt County local.
Knowing that even passengers can get arrested and detained — which happened to at least three people during the May 12 operation — has left people hesitant to leave their homes for anything, from school to prayer.
“They don't wanna come to church,” Garcia said. “So what do you do? What do you to help them?”
Santos Quintana Rosa was one of those passengers arrested. His daughter, Crystal Quintana, said her father called her just after 9 p.m. as the van he was coming home in was pulled over by a Colquitt County deputy.
“I began to tremble, to cry. And I told my dad to wait there. Let's see what we can do,” she remembers. “I was able to hear when the police got up to my dad’s employer ... At some point I heard that the police asked him if he was licensed or not.”
He was. But in the end, it wouldn’t matter for 55-year-old Santos Quintana Rosa. He would end up in Stewart Detention Center, and his immigration case is ongoing. It’s a blow to Crystal, who does not drive and therefore can’t go often to visit her only living parent.
“I get so angry that I can't help my parents,” she said. “Everything they have done for us is something that I feel I owe them. If we hadn't been born here, our life would have been very different.”
HISTORY REPEATING ITSELF
It’s not the first time local police have been used in immigration enforcement.
Atlanta immigration attorney Charles Kuck and his firm have represented college students threatened with deportation, including high-profile cases such as that of a teenager in Dalton who was arrested and detained by a police officer over a traffic infraction.
“It's no surprise to me — and it shouldn't be a surprise to anybody who's been in Georgia for 20 years — that this is happening,” Kuck said.
Similar tactics were deployed under President Barack Obama’s administration —back then a program called the “Secure Communities” helped ICE identify people to deport through fingerprints taken at local jails. Obama would go on to roll back that program.
What's different now is that cities and counties that don't comply with immigration enforcement have a lot more at stake. The Trump administration has threatened litigation, public exposure and a termination of federal funding.
In a May release, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem put so-called “sanctuary” cities and states “on notice,” saying anyone who interferes with federal immigration enforcement would be held accountable.
“So they understand, look, if we don't cooperate with ICE, they're probably going to yank our money,” Kuck said.
So far federal courts have blocked efforts by the Trump administration to pull money out of places where local law enforcement have defied compliance with ICE. Georgia was recently taken off a list published at first by the Department of Justice earlier this year.
But Kuck said some sheriffs in Georgia may be afraid anyway of being charged with state crimes for not working with federal law enforcement.
“At least here in Georgia, where there's state laws addressing these issues, it doesn't matter whether you're doing 287(g) or not,” he said. “You're still going to cooperate with ICE.”
Across Georgia’s 159 counties, there are only 28 agencies – from local sheriffs to the Georgia Department of Corrections – with formal 287(g) agreements on the books.
When adjusted for population, immigration arrests according to data collected from ICE are occurring in Georgia at about twice the rate of place like California or New Jersey. What’s happening in Georgia falls in line with most Republican led states.
Of the just over 5,000 people have been arrested in Georgia by ICE through the end of July, almost half were arrested in the city of Atlanta.
TANGIBLE IMPACTS
In Colquitt County, the arrests and the fear that followed them have already meant a blow to the county’s primary industry of agriculture.
There are over 400 farms in Colquitt County, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Millions of acres are dedicated to poultry, while annual sales for goods such as cotton, peanuts and vegetables place the county in the state’s top five for overall crop production.
Republican Charles “Chas” Cannon represents the area around Colquitt County in the Georgia House. He agrees with President Trump’s immigration enforcement push. to deport people. But he said after the May 12 arrests, he got calls from dozens of farmers.
“And they said, ‘Well, my guys didn't show up for work today.’ And this guy's crew didn't show up for work today,” Cannon said. “That's a problem.”
Colquitt County farms rely on immigrant labor.
“I mean I don't blame them,” Cannon said. “If somebody tried to come and take me, I'd be a little bit frightened, too.”
He wishes, for the sake of farmers’ profits, that there was a better, easier way to keep foreign workers in the U.S., like a faster process to approve work visas. But like many others in Georgia’s Republican delegation, he also supports a reduction in wages under the popular H-2A visa program because he says the cost puts a strain on farmers.
At the end of the day, it worried Cannon to hear from so many farmers whose fields were left empty after the May 12 arrests. Cannon said he would also like to see more “latitude” for local officers, so they could choose what immigration arrests they make.
“If they stop somebody that's illegal, I mean they have [to] — that's the law,” Cannon said. “But again, we're putting law enforcement in that position to make that decision on the fly. And there needs to be some more delineation, some more clarity. And so that’s kind of what we’re asking for.”
For Cannon, that clarity would ideally come from the federal government.
Sarabia Morales spent years building a life, and family, in this South Georgia community. For a while, they were welcomed. But now, the family says they would feel safer back in Mexico.
“We don't want to be here anymore,” said Olga Mata, Lorenzo’s wife. “But now with the immigration case he has, we have to wait.”
While in detention, Sarabia Morales says he was treated poorly. He described crowded cells where people had to sleep on floors and food that “a dog wouldn’t eat.” He met people who weren’t receiving medical attention when they needed it. Upon returning home, he had difficulty sleeping, relying on melatonin gummies to drown out the lingering sounds of guards shouting for counts.
Returning to their home country won’t erase that experience but it would prevent it from happening again. That’s a security they are willing to gamble.
“The American Dream does not exist,” Sarabia Morales said. “I came to find it, and could not.”
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