As Georgia ranks as one of the top states for Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrests, immigrants, families, and advocates on the front lines share their fears and the fight for freedom in a series of interviews.
Nana Gyamfi is intentional about the word she uses to encapsulate federal agents’ ongoing sweep in Atlanta and throughout the state for both documented and undocumented immigrants.
“I use the term body snatchers as a catch-all term for the government enforcement agents and their masked mercenaries to make clear that there is no distinction between the systems they work for — immigration and criminal enforcement systems — and to highlight their continued function: to snatch our people, our loved ones, our neighbors, our co-workers away from us,” she said. “To them, our people are bodies for their quotas, their body count.”
Stories of people being detained and disappeared while taking their children to school, of unsanitary detention centers, and the lack of due process fuel Gyamfi’s efforts as executive director of the Black Alliance for Just Immigration, which works to advocate for and empower immigrants from across the African diaspora.
In addition to local chapters in Georgia, California, New York, and Florida, the 20-year-old organization’s legal resources and clinics are available virtually. The legal and policy staff host bi-weekly asylum support webinars.
Gyamfi is leading one of the many grassroots organizations fighting to disseminate information and provide legal support and everyday resources at a time of unprecedented attacks on immigrant communities.
Pew Research estimates around 200,000 Black immigrants, mostly from Jamaica, Haiti, and Nigeria, call metro Atlanta home. According to Gyamfi, Black migrants are detained, deported, and held in solitary confinement at a disproportionately higher rate.
“The fear has increased,” she said when asked about the current feeling in the city. “People find themselves not wanting to go to the grocery store, take kids to school, or go to work.”
Tensions in immigrant communities ratcheted up last year after Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp bolstered efforts in the state to support President Donald Trump’s deportation efforts. Last March, Kemp announced that the Georgia Department of Public Safety had requested that Immigration and Customs Enforcement train 1,100 officers “to better assist in identifying and apprehending illegal aliens who pose a risk to public safety in the state.”
“The fear has increased. People find themselves not wanting to go to the grocery store, take kids to school, or go to work.”
Nana Gyamfi, executive director of the Black Alliance for Just Immigration
Then in May, Kemp signed House Bill 1105, requiring sheriffs to hold suspects believed to be in the country illegally if they are wanted by ICE. Charlton County, located 10 miles from the Florida border and 274 miles south of Atlanta, approved a nearly $50 million agreement with ICE last June to expand the Folkston ICE Processing Center from 1,100 detainees to nearly 3,000, making it the largest private detention facility in the country.
The small town of Social Circle, located 45 miles outside of Atlanta, made headlines this week when The Washington Post reported that federal immigration officials were planning to use warehouses in the community as a detention facility to house 5,000 to 10,000 people being staged for deportation.
Gyamfi said the fear of arrest, detention and deportation has even spread to those in the immigrant community who thought they were safe.
“If you look at percentages, [Black immigrants] are some of the most documented. Most could feel some sense of security. That has disappeared. People with protected status, they were living out in the open, they have jobs, they have kids and have been here for decades. But suddenly, at a traffic stop, the body snatchers end up taking them to a detention prison. This wasn’t on people’s radar.”
People who once felt comfortable in a place like Atlanta, full of people that look like them and where Black folks have power, now find themselves making choices every day about how they move through the city. Many are staying home or abandoning their churches, while others are unwilling to speak on the phone for fear that lines are tapped.
For Gyamfi, the new threat level means her organization’s work now expands to support basic everyday needs.
“We are providing aid for food drives to elders and disabled folks who are even more vulnerable.”
Gyamfi said she is encouraged by seeing people engaged in community defense and supports their efforts by creating emergency preparedness plans, distributing know-your-rights information, and continuing the work of locating people who have been detained.
Staff writer Madeline Thigpen contributed to this report.
