Atlanta is saying “no” to ICE. The city is set to permanently end its relationship with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) when it comes to accepting immigration detainees at the Atlanta City Jail.
Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms has “signed an executive order for transferring all remaining U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detainees out of the city jail and declaring that Atlanta will no longer hold anyone for the federal agency,” The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported.
“We will no longer be complicit with a policy that intentionally inflicts misery on a vulnerable population without giving any thought to the fallout,” Lance Bottoms said. “As the birthplace of the civil rights movement, we are called to be better than this.”
Several ICE detainees have already been removed from the jail.
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The Atlanta City Detention Center housed just 5 ICE detainees, down from 205 in June. Although the city will not hold ICE detainees any longer, it will jail detainees for other federal agencies.
“The city, the mayor added, has entered into a partnership with Uber and a pair of Catholic and Lutheran charities, which will provide free rides and meals to immigrant families that have been separated on the southwest border and reunited in Atlanta,” AJC reported.
Prior to this, Atlanta was paid $78 a day for each ICE detainee it held in the jail through a contract with the U.S. Marshals Service. In all, it collected $7.5 million through this arrangement for this fiscal year, as of June. This amounts to more than a fifth of the jail’s annual $33 million budget.
But the city is ready to end its partnership with ICE following all the reports of families being separated.
“I, along with everyone here, have been horrified not just by the stories of families separated at the U.S.-Mexico border, but also families separated here in metro Atlanta,” said Michelle Maziar with the Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs.
While Azadeh Shahshani, legal and advocacy director for Project South, supports the mayor’s announcement, Shahshani told 11 Alive News more can be done.
“There are detention centers elsewhere in Georgia that we are very concerned about and we are working toward hopefully shutting them down,”
