In a recent hearing led by U.S. District Court Judge Thomas Thrash,
Georgia state attorney Devon Orland was pushed hard to defend the
state’s restrictive and controversial immigration enforcement
regulations. In the hearing, parts of which were published by the
Atlanta Journal Constitution, Thrash questioned the validity and
complexity of the legislation, and was concerned that each district
would translate and implement its own version of the enforcement law.
Below is part of the transcript of Judge Thrash’s comments and
perception of the state’s laws:
“You may have one county that says, okay, we don’t like all these
Hispanic children in our schools so we are going to make it really tough
on anybody that we suspect could be in this country illegally, and we
are going to arrest them and detain them until they leave our county –
except they can come here for two months to pick our Vidalia onions, and
we are not going to bother them then.”
And then we like the people down at the Mexican restaurant, like the
food there, so we are not going to bother the cook. And we are not going
to bother the guy that does the mayor’s yard work. They’re a nice
family, and we are going to leave them alone. But we are going to make
life so difficult for everybody else that they are going to leave –
except the ones we need to pick our crops or do yard work or wash the
dishes in the restaurant.
“I mean, you are not going to have 50 systems of immigration regulation.
In Georgia, you are going to have 159. Every county, every municipality
is going to decide what its immigration policy is going to be under
this law.”
