ICE Detainers Reported by Georgia Jails

Limitations

Coverage is partial and uneven, and a missing county-quarter means NOT COLLECTED, never zero detainers: 91 of Georgia's 159 counties are represented and few have a complete run. There is no central repository, index, dataset or API for these reports - each jurisdiction posts to its own website on its own schedule - so the corpus is what a sweep of all 159 counties reached on 2026-09-07. Absence here is not a finding of non-compliance, and a statewide total over time would trace the sweep's reach as much as any trend. The counts are not comparable across counties without the screening columns. A jail that queries the LESC on every booking will record more detainers than one that queries almost none at identical underlying population - Fulton ran 89 inquiries against 5,480 bookings in a quarter while Coffee ran 714 against 714. num_detainers is a joint product of jail population and screening policy, and the reports do not separate them. The five counts are meant to narrow at every step - bookings, then LESC inquiries, then responses, then responses indicating unlawful presence, then detainers - and about one county-quarter in nine publishes a chain that cannot be literally true, most often more detainers than illegal-alien responses. Nothing validates these forms before a sheriff posts them. The published figure is preserved rather than corrected, so a value here is always what the jurisdiction filed. The exact count is on the topic's transform manifest, broken down by which link broke. There is no mandated form: counties use at least eight layouts and their own wording, and a few appear to report a foreign-born or screened subtotal in the total-bookings row. A figure is published as filed, under the statutory field its printed label actually means - and withheld where the label means something else. That affects section 42-4-16(a)(4) most: of its 28 NULLs in 340 county-quarters, 9 filings carry no such row at all, 1 prints the row with an empty cell, and 18 print a figure that is not (a)(4) - 14 a 'Responses of Foreign-Born' count, which is broader than unlawful presence, and 4 a combined 'Detainers / Confirmations' row reporting one number for two statutory fields. The printed label of every value, published or withheld, is in the transform's readings.csv. The row is the county, not one jail. Where a municipal detention facility filed alongside the county jail the row is the sum of both - East Point Police Department with the Fulton County Sheriff for 2025 Q3. Hart County's only filing is from Hartwell Municipal Jail, not the county sheriff. The reports say nothing about what followed a detainer: whether it was honored, how long anyone was held, or whether ICE took custody. For detainers as ICE records issuing them see immigration/ice_detainers - a different measurement, from a federal FOIA release, counting what ICE says it prepared rather than what the receiving jail says it got. Quarters before 2025 Q1 are voluntary: section 42-4-16 took effect 2024-12-31, so the 2024 rows are the handful of jurisdictions that filed early and are not a statewide series. 2026 Q2 is the last quarter that had closed when the reports were collected.