ICE opens new satellite field office in College Park

The College Park office will likely play a supporting role to ICE’s existing Atlanta field office, located downtown on Ted Turner Drive. Immigrants visit that field office every day during the week for mandatory check-in appointments with authorities or to attend immigration court.

Not all states have ICE field offices.

The Atlanta office oversees immigration enforcement across Georgia, North Carolina and South Carolina.

In the first nine months of the second Trump administration, ICE’s Atlanta field office accounted for nearly 15,200 immigration arrests, according to federal data obtained by the Deportation Data Project, a group of lawyers and researchers at the law school of the University of California, Berkeley. That total makes the Atlanta field office the fifth-most prolific office for ICE arrests nationwide.

Last year, the AJC reported that dozens of immigrants were being detained for days in holding cells located in the basement of ICE’s Atlanta field office, despite that facility not being set up for long-term stays — lacking beds and showers.

In addition to the downtown field office, Georgia is also already home to an extensive immigration-detention network. ICE operates three major detention centers in the state, and there are reports of more being in the works.

According to an analysis of immigration detention data by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), a research institute at Syracuse University, Georgia facilities housed 3,973 immigrant detainees as of late November — the fifth biggest detained immigrant population in the country behind Texas, Louisiana, California and Florida.

News of a new ICE office in metro Atlanta comes amid a growing protest movement locally against immigration enforcement, following two fatal shootings by federal agents this month in Minneapolis.