Georgia National Guard to support Trump's immigration enforcement push
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Pfc. Edwin Lopez of the Georgia National Guard loads bottled water onto a trailer in Augusta in October 2024. Photo: Sam Wolfe for The Washington Post/Getty Images
The Georgia National Guard will assist federal immigration officials in President Trump's expanding effort to arrest and deport unauthorized immigrants.
Why it matters: The deployment comes as the White House aims to meet ambitious detainment and deportation quotas and threatens to deploy "regular" military to major U.S. cities that he says are failing to battle crime.
Driving the news: Georgia is one of 19 states that will deploy a total of 1,700 guard members to assist the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Fox News reported over the weekend.
- The effort, a White House official told Fox, is unrelated to Trump's decision to deploy the U.S. military to Washington, D.C., to combat crime.
Flashback: In June, Trump deployed up to 2,000 National Guard members to Los Angeles in response to protests over the immigration sweeps.
Zoom in: About 75 Georgia guard soldiers and airmen will provide "administrative and logistical" support, freeing up ICE agents to conduct enforcement, according to a Monday statement from Gov. Brian Kemp and the Georgia National Guard.
- Guard members will undergo processing and training in mid-September and could begin operations shortly thereafter, the statement said.
- A Georgia National Guard spokesperson added that the guard has often partnered with "federal, state, and local agencies to ensure the safety and security of our communities."
The other side: "What is before us is not from foreign shores but from within — the possibility of deploying troops on our own soil, against our own citizens," state Rep. Eric Bell (D-Jonesboro) said in a statement. "This is no act of security."
- He urged guard members not to participate or be compelled to participate. "Those should remember that their obligations are to the Constitution and the people, not to authority."
Zoom out: Georgia has one of the largest populations of unauthorized immigrants in the U.S., according to a recent Pew Research Center study.
- Georgia and seven other states saw the unauthorized immigrant population grow by 75,000 or more people from 2021 to 2023, the most recent year for which data is available.
- Pew said the unauthorized immigrant population has probably started to drop "due in part to increased deportations and reduced protections under the Trump administration."
By the numbers: The number of people in immigration detention has soared by more than 50% since Trump took office — and that doesn't include thousands more detainees who aren't in the administration's official count, Axios' Russell Contreras and Brittany Gibson report.