Bottoms Transfers ICE inmates; Gwinnett Eyes Taking Them
by Phil Kent | Sep 7, 2018 |

Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms yesterday signed an executive order ending the city’s contract with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and calling for all remaining illegal alien detainees to be transferred out of the Atlanta City Detention Center. Critics say it basically turns Atlanta into a “sanctuary city” for illegal immigrants and prompted neighboring Gwinnett County Sheriff Butch Conway to tell InsiderAdvantage: “I am open to take a look at holding these ICE prisoners and willing to talk to ICE about it.”

The federal ICE agency, tasked with not just arresting and deporting illegal aliens but also sex and drug traffickers, pays for the housing of criminal immigrants. According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the lost revenue represents one-fifth of the Atlanta’s jail’s budget.

Atlanta, though, has enough money to fund a legal defense fund for illegal aliens. Just last November, the city set aside $150,000 of taxpayer money for legal defense for people who are accused of running afoul of federal immigration law under a program with the nonprofit Vera Institute of Justice.

Bottoms turned to an advisory board for advice on the executive order and a look at the membership reveals it is heavy with former inmates, self-described left-wing activists and Atlanta immigration attorney Charles Kuck.

“The new mayor has set up an advisory board consisting of well-known corporate-funded, anti-enforcement immigration activists and seems to have adopted the leftist open borders agenda and run with it,” says D.A. King, president of the Dustin Inman Society. “It raises the question: is the city getting too much funding from taxpayers? Mayor Bottoms has enough taxpayer funding to offer legal assistance to illegal aliens facing deportation and enough to end a program that reportedly represents a fifth of the revenue for jail funding. Add to that the family separation hardship she has inflicted on the families of illegal aliens who are captured in the future and will now be transferred to distant south Georgia holding facilities instead of being close by in the Atlanta jail.”

Phil Kent is the CEO and publisher of InsiderAdvantage and a regular panelist on Fox5Atlanta’s Sunday Georgia Gang broadcast. Here.