{"main_topic":"immigration","sub_topic":"ga_jails","topic":"quarterly_detainer_reports","key":"immigration/ga_jails/quarterly_detainer_reports","version":"1.0.0","year_min":2024,"year_max":2026,"year_gaps":[],"update_frequency":"quarterly","detail_levels":["counties"],"default_detail":"counties","path_template":"immigration/quarterly_detainer_reports/year={year}/{detail}.parquet","grain":["year","quarter","county_fips"],"title":"ICE Detainers Reported by Georgia Jails","summary":"Detainers ICE lodged at Georgia county jails and municipal detention facilities, quarter by quarter, with the LESC screening behind them - as the jails themselves published it under O.C.G.A. § 42-4-16. Assembled filing by filing from 91 of Georgia's 159 counties; coverage is partial and a missing county-quarter means not collected, not zero.","description":"The quarterly immigration reports Georgia county jails and municipal detention facilities publish under O.C.G.A. § 42-4-16 (HB 1105, the Georgia Criminal Alien Track and Report Act of 2024). For each county and calendar quarter: inmates booked, inquiries the jail made to the federal Law Enforcement Support Center about foreign-born inmates, responses received, responses saying an inmate is unlawfully present, and immigration detainers issued by ICE. Collected filing by filing from 91 jurisdictions' own websites - there is no central repository - and read from the published page.","source":"Individual Georgia sheriffs' offices and county governments - quarterly jail reports published under O.C.G.A. § 42-4-16, collected and catalogued by Georgia Civic Data","source_url":"https://law.justia.com/codes/georgia/title-42/chapter-4/article-1/section-42-4-16/","endpoint":"/api/v1/immigration/quarterly_detainer_reports","columns":[{"name":"year","type":"integer","role":"year","nullable":false,"label":"Year","short_description":"","description":"Calendar year of the reporting quarter, taken from the filing itself - never from the URL it was downloaded from, which for WordPress sites is the upload year and is routinely a year off.","valid_values":null,"example":2025,"unit":null,"value_min":null,"value_max":null,"null_meaning":null,"key_metric_grain_contributor":false,"metric_component":null},{"name":"quarter","type":"string","role":"categorical","nullable":false,"label":"Quarter","short_description":"Calendar quarter the report covers.","description":"Calendar quarter the filing reports: 'q1' (January-March) through 'q4' (October-December). One row per reporting quarter, with no monthly grain and no annual total - a year's quarters appear only where the jurisdiction filed them, so summing an incomplete set understates the year. § 42-4-16 is a quarterly duty, but a few jurisdictions file otherwise: eight filings that cover a single month or a six-month span are excluded rather than forced into a quarter, and a handful of retained filings state a window a day or two off the calendar boundary (Gwinnett reports 31 March to 28 June as its second quarter), which is placed on the quarter its midpoint falls in.","valid_values":["q1","q2","q3","q4"],"example":"q2","unit":null,"value_min":null,"value_max":null,"null_meaning":null,"key_metric_grain_contributor":true,"metric_component":null},{"name":"county_fips","type":"string","role":"fk_county","nullable":false,"label":"County FIPS","short_description":"","description":"5-digit FIPS of the county whose jail filed the report. Where a municipal detention facility filed alongside the county jail, the row is the sum of both filings.","valid_values":null,"example":"13121","unit":null,"value_min":null,"value_max":null,"null_meaning":null,"key_metric_grain_contributor":false,"metric_component":null},{"name":"num_inmates_booked","type":"integer","role":"metric","nullable":true,"label":"Number Inmates Booked","short_description":"Inmates booked into the jail that quarter.","description":"§ 42-4-16(a)(1): total inmates booked into the county jail or municipal detention facility during the quarter. The denominator for everything else in the table. A handful of jurisdictions appear to report a foreign-born or screened subtotal here instead of total bookings - the value is published as filed.","valid_values":null,"example":5480,"unit":"count","value_min":null,"value_max":null,"null_meaning":"the filing's form has no total-bookings row, or its first row counts something else (Hartwell Municipal Jail reports 'criminal aliens booked')","key_metric_grain_contributor":false,"metric_component":null},{"name":"num_lesc_inquiries","type":"integer","role":"metric","nullable":true,"label":"Number Lesc Inquiries","short_description":"Inquiries the jail sent to the DHS LESC.","description":"§ 42-4-16(a)(2): inquiries the jail made to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's Law Enforcement Support Center (or another federal agency) about the immigration status or prior arrests of foreign-born inmates. This is the screening-effort column, and it is what makes the detainer count interpretable: some jails query on every booking and some query almost never.","valid_values":null,"example":89,"unit":"count","value_min":null,"value_max":null,"null_meaning":"the filing's form has no LESC-inquiries row, or prints a non-numeric placeholder in it - all three NULLs are Spalding, which filed 'PENDING' for 2025 Q1 and 'N/A' for Q2 and Q3","key_metric_grain_contributor":false,"metric_component":null},{"name":"num_lesc_responses","type":"integer","role":"metric","nullable":true,"label":"Number Lesc Responses","short_description":"Responses the LESC sent back.","description":"§ 42-4-16(a)(3): responses received back from the LESC for the inquiries in the previous column.","valid_values":null,"example":38,"unit":"count","value_min":null,"value_max":null,"null_meaning":"the filing's form has no responses-received row (Forsyth's own layout, Cobb's four-bullet letter, Hartwell Municipal Jail), or prints a non-numeric placeholder in it (Spalding filed 'PENDING' and 'N/A' for three quarters)","key_metric_grain_contributor":false,"metric_component":null},{"name":"num_responses_illegal_alien","type":"integer","role":"metric","nullable":true,"label":"Number Responses Illegal Alien","short_description":"Responses saying an inmate is unlawfully present.","description":"§ 42-4-16(a)(4): the responses in the previous column that indicated a foreign-born inmate is an illegal alien as § 42-4-14 defines the term. The sparsest column in the table: NULL in 28 of 340 county-quarters (8%), in three ways. Nine filings carry no such row at all - the jail-management-system printouts (Atkinson, Jasper, Tift, Ware) and the Chatham and Glynn alternate statistical reports. One prints the row and leaves the cell empty (Baldwin, 2026 Q1). The remaining 18 print a figure that is not this field and are withheld here: 14 labelled 'Responses of Foreign-Born', which counts a broader group than unlawful presence, and 4 Barrow quarters printing one number under a combined 'Detainers / Confirmations' label.","valid_values":null,"example":38,"unit":"count","value_min":null,"value_max":null,"null_meaning":"the filing's form has no such row (the jail-management-system printouts and the Chatham/Glynn alternate layouts omit it), or its row counts something other than § 42-4-16(a)(4) and was withheld - a 'Responses of Foreign-Born' row, which is broader than unlawful presence, or a combined 'Detainers / Confirmations' row that reports one number for two statutory fields","key_metric_grain_contributor":false,"metric_component":null},{"name":"num_detainers","type":"integer","role":"metric","nullable":true,"label":"Number Detainers","short_description":"ICE immigration detainers the jail received.","description":"§ 42-4-16(a)(5): immigration detainers issued by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement for prisoners in the jail during the quarter - the count the statute exists to surface, and the only recurring official measure of ICE detainer volume that is reported by the receiving Georgia jail itself. Read it against num_lesc_inquiries: a jail that queries LESC on every booking will show more detainers than one that queries almost none at identical population. The report says nothing about what happened next - whether the detainer was honored, how long anyone was held, or whether ICE took custody.","valid_values":null,"example":37,"unit":"count","value_min":null,"value_max":null,"null_meaning":"the filing's form has no detainers row","key_metric_grain_contributor":false,"metric_component":null}],"key_metric":"num_detainers","usage":"Star-schema fact table. Join the counties dimension on county_fips. Read directly with DuckDB over Parquet.","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.","null_semantics":{"suppressed_to_null":false,"zero_is_real":true},"available_years":[2024,2025,2026],"schema_hash":"8bdd2bc85a9dfb0f472261a59e656a96e23531c61f996ad6cbaf436848a3153b","tags":["immigration","individual georgia sheriffs' offices and county governments - quarterly jail reports published under o.c.g.a. § 42-4-16, collected and catalogued by georgia civic data","quarterly_detainer_reports"],"granularity_description":"One row per year, quarter, county_fips.","example_queries":[{"description":"Latest year (2026), counties detail","query":"SELECT * FROM quarterly_detainer_reports WHERE year = 2026 LIMIT 100"},{"description":"Filter by quarter = q2","query":"SELECT * FROM quarterly_detainer_reports WHERE quarter = 'q2' AND year = 2026 LIMIT 100"}],"foreign_keys":[{"column":"county_fips","target_object":"counties","target_columns":["county_fips"],"attribute_columns_added":["county_name"],"scope":"global"}],"filters":[{"param":"year","kind":"year_exact","type":"integer","multi_value":false,"enum_enforced":false,"values":null},{"param":"year_min","kind":"year_range","type":"integer","multi_value":false,"enum_enforced":false,"values":null},{"param":"year_max","kind":"year_range","type":"integer","multi_value":false,"enum_enforced":false,"values":null},{"param":"detail","kind":"detail","type":"string","multi_value":false,"enum_enforced":true,"values":["counties"],"default":"counties"},{"param":"county_fips","kind":"foreign_key","column":"county_fips","type":"string","multi_value":true,"enum_enforced":false,"values":null},{"param":"quarter","kind":"categorical","column":"quarter","type":"string","multi_value":true,"enum_enforced":true,"values":["q1","q2","q3","q4"],"has_total":false,"total_value":null,"requires_single_value":true,"nullable":false,"null_filter_token":null}],"filter_hints":[],"values_endpoint":"/api/v1/immigration/quarterly_detainer_reports/values"}