Earlier this fall, local police pulled over a silver work van in Hoschton, a small city northeast of Gwinnett County, over a malfunctioning brake light.
Just three minutes later, the officer was speaking to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent who had arrived on the scene, according to an incident report and body camera footage of the traffic stop obtained from the Hoschton Police Department.
The van’s driver was a man who spoke in broken English, and who had identified himself to police as a national of El Salvador. He was wearing a shirt bearing the insignia of a local contracting company and was accompanied by a female passenger.
“I’ll bring ‘em to you,” the Hoschton officer, Brandon Bryan, told the ICE agent on the scene, who wound up taking the driver into custody. Neither the ICE agent involved nor the van’s driver were identified in the Hoschton police report.
The traffic stop illustrates the collaborative relationship between local Georgia law enforcement and federal immigration authorities, a dynamic that is aiding the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign in Georgia.
Tal Parden, a captain with the Hoschton Police Department, said his agency did not initiate contact with ICE. Instead, ICE reached out to Hoschton PD and expressed interest in shadowing its officers as they made traffic stops, according to Parden.
Although not required to comply, Parden said he agreed, citing the Trump administration’s emphasis on increasing immigration enforcement. The joint operation between ICE and Hoschton police, which took place on Sept. 23, yielded four immigration arrests and has not been repeated since, Parden said.
Officials with ICE did not responded to a request for comment from The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
The Hoschton arrests are reminiscent of ICE’s collaboration with the Chatham County Police Department in Savannah earlier this year. In that collaboration, ICE rode in the passenger seat with a Chatham County police officer in one traffic stop, and arrived on the scene of another shortly after a traffic stop was initiated. In both of those cases, ICE took immigrants into custody.
It was an unusual level of collaboration between local police and federal agents, immigration attorneys and advocates have told the AJC. It is unclear if, or how often, that collaboration has played out with other police departments in the state.
A Georgia immigration bill passed in 2024 mandates close cooperation between county sheriffs’ offices and ICE, to systemically flag foreign-born people booked in local jails to ICE for possible pickup and deportation.
But the kind of partnership documented between federal immigration enforcement and police departments in Savannah and Hoschton is not required by law.
At least two of the vehicles stopped in both operations were work vans.
Mario Guevara, the immigration reporter formerly based in metro Atlanta who was deported in October, says work vans seem to be targeted by law enforcement to boost immigration arrests.
Guevara continues receiving videos and tips from followers in Georgia about ICE activity, and regularly shares photos on social media of work vans left abandoned following arrests, so that relatives of the detained drivers can retrieve them.
“Stop using this type of vehicle or make sure they’re only driven by people who are citizens,” he wrote recently on his Facebook page.
Among the immigrants apprehended during both the Hoschton and Savannah traffic stops were individuals who were driving in Georgia with out-of-state licenses. In Savannah, one of the men arrested, Maximo Morales Sales, was driving with an Illinois license. The man behind the wheel of the silver work van in Hoschton had a license from Maryland.
Both Maryland and Illinois allow unauthorized immigrants to obtain driver’s licenses. Georgia does not.
The Hoschton driver, who said he was in the region for work in drywall, had initially told officer Bryan that he had only been living in Georgia, specifically in Norcross, for two months. But when questioned again by Bryan’s backup officer, he changed his answer to one year.
“You got to get a Georgia license after 30 days,” the Hoschton police officer told him shortly before the driver was walked over to ICE.
Credit: Courtesy of the Hoschton Police Department
Credit: Courtesy of the Hoschton Police Department
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