A coalition of Georgia nonprofits is suing President Donald Trump’s administration for access to records about the growing footprint of immigration detention in the state.
Long a tent-pole for Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s detention network, Georgia has remained in the spotlight as detentions have soared over the last 20 months.
As of July 9, Georgia held 4,556 immigrant detainees, fourth-most out of all U.S. states, according to ICE data compiled by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), a data research organization. That is up over 90% compared with January 2025.
Glimpsing into Georgia’s immigration detention network “feels so elusive, and it shouldn’t be,” said Raneem Ashrawi, staff attorney at the ACLU of Georgia, one of the organizations behind the new lawsuit against ICE.
“This is the federal government,” Ashrawi said. “These are our government officials who are taking these actions using our taxpayer dollars to detain immigrants in Atlanta, in other parts of Georgia, and we have the right to know what they are doing.”
The ACLU of Georgia and others sued ICE for records pertaining to immigrant detention under the Freedom of Information Act. The suit, filed July 17 in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia, is described by plaintiffs as an act of last resort following what they allege are repeated failures by ICE to respond to records requests filed directly with the agency.
“We hope that this FOIA lawsuit will be the first step toward transparency and eventual accountability,” said Priyanka Bhatt, an attorney with Project South, an Atlanta-based immigrant rights advocacy group.
Credit: Jenni Girtman
Credit: Jenni Girtman
ICE did not respond to a request for comment.
Since Trump’s return to the White House, the administration has restarted an ICE contract with a controversial South Georgia jail that had been scrapped under President Joe Biden. Officials have also begun using Atlanta’s federal penitentiary to hold immigrant detainees, as well as the basement of the agency’s field office downtown. And ICE contracts with a private company to run the Stewart Detention Center, one of the largest immigrant lockups in the nation currently holding around 2,000 detainees.
Plans to convert two Georgia industrial warehouses into new ICE detention facilities made news earlier this year, though those appear to have since been put on hold.
Among the federal lawsuit’s priorities is to obtain information about the conditions faced by people detained in the local ICE field office, located in downtown Atlanta.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has reported that hundreds of immigrants have been detained there for long periods, according to an analysis of ICE detention data covering the first nine months of the second Trump administration.
The field office is a building with holding cells in its basement that lack showers and beds, and provides no opportunity for visits from loved ones or attorneys.
Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com
Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com
Agency guidance previously held that detainees could spend no more than 12 hours in a holding area. The Trump administration revised that limit up to 72 hours.
The AJC previously spoke with immigrants detained at the field office, as well as with their attorneys and family members, who described difficult conditions in a facility not set up for overnight stays. One attorney, Tucker-based Nicole Kozycki, said her client, a nursing mother, spent nine days sleeping on the floor at the Atlanta field office.
Ashrawi said the ACLU of Georgia has received reports about field office detainees lacking adequate access to food, hygiene products and medical care.
“We’ve heard some of these reports from individuals or their attorneys who have that experience of being detained there, but the government has the records that can tell us a lot more, and I think that that’s what we want to know, right?” Ashrawi said. “What’s happening inside? What are these conditions that our community members are being held in?”
Samantha Hamilton is an attorney at Asian Americans Advancing Justice-Atlanta, one of the plaintiffs in the suit for ICE records. She said documents from the agency could shed light on how officials decide who to detain at the field office, and who to send to one of Georgia’s ICE detention centers.
“We are hopeful that the records will reveal something more about the logic, if any, ICE is using to decide who gets detained in the hold room and for how long, because so much of what ICE is doing seems so arbitrary,” Hamilton said. “From what I found, it can be helpful to try to identify some trends in their practice, so that we can advise clients in the future and hopefully get in front of these civil rights abuses and put an end to them.”
Credit: Miguel Martinez-Jimenez
Credit: Miguel Martinez-Jimenez
The lawsuit also asks for records concerning the agency’s purchase of two industrial warehouses in Social Circle and Oakwood, with the aim of converting those buildings into massive immigration detention facilities.
Although the administration seems to have walked away from those plans and is reportedly exploring offering the sites to other federal agencies, Ashrawi said plaintiffs remain interest in records about the warehouse initiative.
The federal government “already used taxpayer dollars to purchase these warehouses. And knowing what has already happened or what might have happened is still in the public interest, right?” she said. “We know that there is a loud and aggressive push for this immigration agenda. We know that (the Department of Homeland Security) was pretty secretive about the details of this plan and it took a lot of public pressure to to change that.”
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