Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, a Democrat, signed an executive order Wednesday preventing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) from housing apprehended illegal aliens in the city’s detainment center, a pre-established arrangement the Georgian capital had with the federal immigration agency.
“Until the City of Atlanta receives assurance that this despicable policy of the Trump administration has been rescinded, I will not allow the City of Atlanta to risk being complicit in separating families as a result of this policy,” Bottoms states in the order.
The order was signed on the same day President Trump signed an executive order of his own intending to prevent the splitting of families across the southern border.
Despite temporarily banning ICE from bringing detainees into Atlanta, Bottoms’ executive order does not address the issue of detained drug and sex traffickers disguising children as their own.
In an official statement, Bottoms said she feared that her executive order could potentially “result in individuals being sent to private, substandard, for-profit facilities in the state, as these facilities do not offer publicly-funded access to legal representation that may help detainees successfully challenge their immigration status, but the inhumane action of family separation demands that Atlanta act now.”
In summary, Bottoms says the government detention centers are cruel, and temporarily banned the use of her own, but at the same time, is afraid of the alternate: private enterprise. So what exactly does she want?