Morning, y’all! The Waffle House near me closed recently. I didn’t realize Waffle Houses could close. I thought there was some sort of legally enforceable threshold for how far away the average Georgian can live from a Waffle House. It just seems wrong!
Let’s get to it.
ICE AT THE AIRPORT
Credit: Jason Getz/AJC
Credit: Jason Getz/AJC
Immigration and Customs Enforcement is increasing arrests at airports around the country, including Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport. The agency’s new strategy involves apprehending people with expired visas as they travel domestically.
- During their Atlanta operations, ICE accidentally apprehended a U.S. citizen confused for a British immigrant.
- They also arrested a Venezuelan immigrant who entered the country legally and, when his visa expired in 2024, applied for political asylum to stay in the country.
- News of ICE’s amplified airport presence has further concerned immigration advocates who say it’s an unprecedented strategy. Previously, ICE only targeted travelers with deportation orders.
🔎 READ MORE: What ICE says about its increased presence
Meanwhile, Georgia immigration judges are denying bond to detained immigrants at higher rates.
- Immigration judges in Georgia approved nearly half of all bond applications from 2020 to 2024.
- From January 2025 through June 2026, the latest month of available data, bonds in Georgia were granted just over 25% of the time.
- It used to be easier for detainees to secure bond and await immigration trials at home if they had no criminal record and strong community ties. Not anymore.
🔎 READ MORE: ‘Torn apart our family’: A detainee’s wife speaks
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AN ALPHARETTA PONZI SCHEME SAGA ENDS
Credit: Miguel Martinez-Jimenez
Credit: Miguel Martinez-Jimenez
The chief operating officer of Drive Planning, a defunct Alpharetta investment firm federal prosecutors say was a $380 million Ponzi scheme, was just sentenced to four years in prison after pleading guilty to fraud.
- David Bradford is the first of three Drive Planning executives to be sentenced this week in Atlanta.
- Drive Planning marketed several sham investment opportunities tied to real estate between September 2020 and June 2024, falsely promising secure loans and high returns while using new investors’ money to pay other investors, prosecutors allege.
- Federal prosecutors also said the operation was likely Georgia’s largest Ponzi scheme, with more than 2,000 investors defrauded out of around $380 million.
- Bradford is a pastor, and the judge said his crime was deplorable in part because he met some of the victims through church and convinced them to invest with him.
🔎 READ MORE: Bradford’s confession had a domino effect on the case
DEKALB RESTARTS SCHOOL CLOSURE PROCESS
With the beginning of the new school year, the DeKalb County School District restarted its effort to figure out what to do about its overcrowded and underused facilities.
- District leaders spent much of the spring semester exploring options to close roughly two dozen elementary schools to address declining district enrollment.
- The proposals were met with largely negative feedback, so officials hit pause for the summer.
- DeKalb school leaders will create Community Advisory Teams and spend the next few months looking at overcrowded schools in the northern part of the district.
DeKalb families, here’s how to apply for the Community Advisory Teams, or offer feedback another way.
MUST-KNOW POLITICS AND BUSINESS
🚆 MARTA’s board will vote today on the agency’s new CEO. Here’s a rundown of the top three candidates, a lineup that includes current interim CEO Jonathan Hunt.
🏛️ Republicans have controlled the General Assembly and governor’s office for a generation, recently focusing on cutting income and property taxes. While Democrats largely opposed those tax cuts, they’re now seeking public input on what a Democratic majority should prioritize.
💼 GOP gubernatorial nominee Rick Jackson unveiled an economic plan Wednesday aimed at restoring historic Black business districts and expanding opportunities for minority-owned businesses. His “Legacy Corridor Initiative” is the latest piece of a deliberate push to broaden his appeal beyond the GOP base.
A DARK, DANGEROUS ONLINE WORLD
It’s Thursday, which means a new episode of the AJC podcast “Flagship,” hosted by me. Each week, we sit down with AJC journalists to go deep on stories that have caught their attention.
- For this week’s episode, I sat down with AJC reporter Taylor Croft, who covered the aftermath of the 2024 Apalachee High School shooting and the trial of the teenage shooter. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to life without parole.
- During the short trial, prosecutors revealed the shooter was obsessed with famous mass shooters, from Aurora and Sandy Hook and more. He joined other obsessives in the deep recesses of the online “true crime community,” and even crafted his attack to specifically appeal to other online devotees.
- We had a fascinating, sobering conversation about the depths of this online world, the fame and belonging it promised, and how prosecutors say details about the shooter’s home life may have pushed him further down a dangerous rabbit hole.
Listen to “Flagship” on the AJC website, or anywhere you get your podcasts. Just search “AJC Flagship.”
Taylor also wrote a must-read piece about the “true crime community,” which is considered a completely different thing than, say, people who watch a lot of “Forensic Files.” She also talked to experts about how parents can stay vigilant about their kids’ online behaviors.
NEWS BITES
A love letter to screen doors, ‘liminal spaces’ that are also bounds of trust
And, most importantly, they keep out the bugs.
[musical group] to headline halftime show for NFL season opener in [country]
Go ahead, take your best guesses. Answers at the bottom.
200+ gold statuettes of Mozart stolen from Salzburg during anniversary tribute
Who’s out here enacting whimsical crime novels in real life?
Seeing the White Sox mascot in a mitre permanently altered my brain chemistry. (In a good way. I think?)
ON THIS DATE
Aug. 13, 1883
Credit: AJC
Credit: AJC
The Kimball razed to the ground by the flames! Yesterday morning at twenty-six minutes to five o’clock the Kimball house was found to be on fire. At half-past eight o’clock it was a smoldering heap of ruins. For years, the burning of this great hotel has been dreaded as a calamity reasonably sure to come and certain to be deplorable in its results. Two things were held to be certain: 1. That its burning would sweep away the whole central part of the city. 2. That a great number of lives would be lost when it was burned. By favorable circumstances that were almost miraculous neither of these results came about.
Cool news backstory to this one: The historic Kimball House burned to the ground early on Aug. 12. The Atlanta Constitution had already printed its Sunday edition, which is why the item appears a day later. Meanwhile, the staff at The Atlanta Journal, which had just started printing at the beginning of 1883, burned the midnight oil and turned out the 1800s equivalent of breaking news coverage, beating the Constitution by an entire day.
ONE MORE THING
The Jonas Brothers will headline the halftime show at the NFL season opener in Australia.
Forget the musical act, that could have been anyone. Australia would not have been my first guess.
Thanks for reading to the very bottom of A.M. ATL. Questions, comments, ideas? Contact us at AMATL@ajc.com.
Until next time.
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