Georgia
Georgia’s Latino community prepares for deportation plan
ATLANTA, Ga. (Atlanta News First) – President-elect Donald Trump has promised a crackdown at the southern border with a widespread deportation plan.
Gigi Pedereza is the director of the Latino Community Foundation of Georgia. She said right now there is a lot of uncertainty from the Latino community in Georgia. Some people are fearful of the plan, while others doubt it will come to fruition.
“There is a lot of fear from some folks and some other folks think nothing is going to happen You have these competing thoughts,” Pedereza said. “What we know is that he has run on this platform. He’s the president-elect and we are expecting there will be changes in immigration. We don’t know how sweeping, how fast, and how that will be implemented, but at this point, it is very concerning. We have already seen hate crimes, we’ve seen physical attacks, and we know folks have received threatening text messages.”
Most of Georgia’s police departments and sheriff’s offices don’t have the power to enforce federal immigration laws.
According to the Georgia Sheriff’s Association (GSA), only a handful of Georgia law enforcement agencies are a part of the 287(g) Program, which can deputize state officers to act as federal immigration agents.
Law enforcement can detain an illegal immigrant if they commit a crime, but the GSA said that often doesn’t lead to deportation.
Last year, the General Assembly passed the Track Act, which requires county jails to report the immigration status of every inmate.
The GSA said despite the mandatory reporting, the majority of immigrants are released after serving their sentences before they can be taken into the custody of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
Pedereza said she’s working with churches and schools to make sure people in the immigrant community are aware of their legal rights.
“I’ve been in a couple of meetings where some of the administrators are concerned about already seeing drops in attendance from children because the parents are afraid, because the kids, when they are in high school, they are afraid of going to school, coming back, and not finding their parents,” said Pedereza.
Copyright 2024 WANF. All rights reserved.
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Kirk Fordice-like Rick Jackson is sounding a whole lot like Daniel Kirkwood Fordice as he tries to be elected Georgia’s next governor.
Fordice came out of nowhere — actually, Vicksburg is somewhere but you know what I mean — in 1991 to become a two-term Mississippi governor.
He had money but nothing like Jackson, a billionaire businessman who’s also trying to emerge from nowhere politically to win Georgia’s top office.
“The establishment hated Trump, because they couldn’t control him. They are going to hate me,” Jackson says in an ad for Georgia’s Republican Primary on May 19, sounding like one of my favorite Mississippi governors — Fordice, because of his unpredictable personality (he could vilify or charm you, all in one sentence), not his politics. He died in 2004 of cancer.
I stood by a cafe entrance one morning, waiting to cover a Fordice speech. When he appeared, I stuck out my hand to shake his. “I’m not shaking your damn hand. You’re part of the problem down there (referring to the newspaper),” he told me, smiling and moving on.
Jackson rose to become one of economic giant-Georgia’s wealthiest people. He came from Atlanta’s rough midtown area, ending up in the foster care system. He left college due to poor financial circumstances.
The 71-year-old Jackson wormed his way into the dynamic city’s business scene in the late 1970s, mostly of the healthcare variety with mixed success before starting a workforce staffing and services company and later an antibiotics manufacturing plant. He turned those businesses into billion-dollar enterprises.
“It’s God’s money,” he said in rural Blakely, and he’s been charitable with it.
Jackson doesn’t try to hide his vast wealth. His family lives in a 48,000-square-foot mansion at Cumming, a place of nearly 100,000 people near Atlanta in Forsyth County, which once promoted its almost all-white population as a virtue.
Atlanta Journal-Constitution columnist Bill Torpy recently wrote that Jackson will spend a ton of his own money in seeking another mansion, the one occupied by Georgia’s governor. Torpy noted that present Lt. Gov. Burt Jones was once heavily favored to win the primary race, but he’s fallen behind Jackson’s bold money bid.
“The one-time front-runner in the Republican primary (Jones) has been relegated to No. 2, the result of a $100 million Mack truck running him over.
Rick Jackson, a billionaire healthcare tycoon, a man with a sly smile and reptilian gaze, is the guy driving that truck,” Torpy wrote.
The GOP field includes Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger, who spurned Trump’s demand to find 11,780 votes that would’ve allowed him to win Georgia in 2020.
Fordice was effective with some bombastic rhetoric during his run for governor, but I don’t remember it reaching the histrionic level employed by Jackson. In a major ad blitz, often referencing (Georgia college student) Laken Riley’s murderer, Jackson promises that unauthorized immigrants committing violent crimes will be “deported or departed … any questions?”
In another ad, Jackson growled, “Like President Trump, I don’t owe anybody anything, and like you, I’m sick of career politicians.”
Fordice spent only $1 million to get himself elected Mississippi’s governor. He somewhat sneaked up on the establishment, riding no escalator to the first floor of his Vicksburg concrete river mats-contracting office to declare his intentions. Who could ever forget his announcement seeking the governorship that ran on page 5 of the Clarion Ledger?
Recent polling ahead of Georgia’s May primaries for governor shows the eventual Republican nominee faces a strong Democrat in the November general election, most likely former Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms. That’ll require another whole pot of money.
— Mac Gordon, a native of McComb, is a retired Mississippi newspaperman. He can be reached at macmarygordon@gmail.com.
Gulfstream recently announced a $5 million investment in Georgia education, welcoming students and leaders to its Savannah headquarters.
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