Georgia’s state House has approved House Bill 1105, which allows police to arrest anyone suspected of being in the US unlawfully and detain them for deportation. The bill comes after the killing of 22-year-old nursing student Laken Riley in Athens, Ga., by Jose Ibarra, a Venezuelan citizen who crossed into the US unlawfully in 2022. ICE detained Ibarra but released him for further processing.
He was later arrested in New York and charged with acting in a manner to injure a child, but he was released before ICE could ask local authorities to take him into custody. The bill requires jailers and sheriffs to report to federal authorities when someone in their custody has been found to not have legal documentation.
Local governments could lose state funding or state-administered federal funding if they don’t report it. State Rep. Jesse Petrea sponsored the legislation, which took on new importance after Riley’s death. The longest-serving Latino lawmaker in Georgia, Rep. Pedro Marin, claimed that the bill aims to advance racial profiling and that it is inappropriate to generalize about entire communities based on the crimes of one person.