Last November, a domestic disturbance call led to Darlin Santos Estrada’s arrest and detention in the DeKalb County Jail. That booking put the 36-year-old Doraville resident and mother of four on Immigration and Customs Enforcement radar.
Believing she had come to the country illegally, ICE asked DeKalb authorities to keep Santos Estrada behind bars after she posted bail — a legal request that gives federal agents time to pick up individuals whom they believe lack legal status to be in the country.
But in an unusual development, agents with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, not ICE, arrived at the DeKalb lockup to bring Santos Estrada into immigration custody, according to the DeKalb County Sheriff’s Office.
It’s an example of a national trend: Since President Donald Trump’s return to the White House, FBI agents and other federal law enforcement officers have been directed to bolster deportation work, even as ICE received a substantial funding increase worth billions of dollars.
Last fall, data obtained by the U.S. Senate showed that nearly a quarter of the country’s FBI agents had been assigned to immigration enforcement.
According to a spokesperson with Atlanta’s FBI office, “assisting with transport” is the agency’s “only role” supporting ICE in Georgia. That includes driving immigrants from county jails to federal custody, the scenario that played out in Santos Estrada’s case.
“We have a rotating number of eight agents on call to assist, as needed,” the FBI spokesperson added.
FBI officials say there are about 250 agents across Georgia, with a majority of them in metro Atlanta.
The growing immigration-related workload at the FBI and other federal agencies, like the Drug Enforcement Administration and the U.S. Marshals Service, is fueling concerns that other types of investigations will proceed at a slower pace, or not at all.
“I think there are better ways to use federal resources,” said Dr. Thaddeus Johnson, a former police commander in Memphis, Tennessee, and an assistant professor of criminal justice and criminology at Georgia State University. Diverting FBI and other federal agents to immigration enforcement means “we take a lot of resources away from crime analysis, a lot of resources away from terrorism, a lot of resources away from drug crimes.”
Credit: Jenni Girtman
Credit: Jenni Girtman
Tasking FBI agents with transporting immigrants “has no public safety value … particularly when these are mostly nonviolent offenders,” Johnson added.
Overall, fewer than a third of all recorded ICE arrestees in Georgia from January 2025 to mid-October were convicted criminals, government data shows.
“We have a long-established relationship of working with DHS on a variety of matters, including counterterrorism, transnational criminal groups, and other criminal threats,” officials with the FBI’s Atlanta office said in a statement. “We’re standing shoulder-to-shoulder with them to assist in their immigration operations.”
Officials at the Department of Homeland Security, the umbrella agency that includes ICE and Border Patrol, did not respond to a request for comment from The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Greater transportation needs
In Georgia, a large share of immigrants arrested by ICE find their way into that agency’s custody after being booked into a local jail, frequently over traffic violations.
When immigrants who may be living in the country without legal status are jailed in Georgia, ICE is automatically alerted. Should immigration officers want to begin deportation proceedings against those individuals, they issue detainers — a request for the local jail to hold onto immigrant detainees for up to 48 hours after the judicial system would otherwise have released them, giving ICE additional time to take them into custody.
ICE detainers are not legally binding, and local law enforcement agencies can choose whether to abide by them. But in Georgia, a 2024 immigration bill took that discretion away. According to the text of the law, HB 1105, sheriffs’ offices must “comply with, honor, and fulfill” detainer requests from ICE.
Detainer requests have surged under President Donald Trump’s administration, putting pressure on ICE to take detainees into custody before the 48-hour deadline expires.
At the DeKalb County Sheriff’s Office alone, the number of ICE detainer requests surged by nearly 600% in under a year — from 32 in the fourth quarter of 2024 to 216 in the third quarter of 2025.
Statewide, Georgia jails received nearly twice as many ICE detainers in the first nine months of the Trump administration relative to the last nine months of Biden’s term, according to federal data obtained through a lawsuit by the Deportation Data Project, a group of lawyers and researchers at the University of California, Berkeley law school.
From Inauguration Day through mid-October, ICE sent over 7,350 detainer requests to local jails across the state. The Gwinnett County Jail received the most during that period (866), followed by the DeKalb County Jail (568).
Credit: Contributed
Credit: Contributed
Vic Hartman, an Atlanta-based former FBI field agent and supervisor, said being tasked with transporting immigrants for ICE could trigger low morale.
“FBI agents, they didn’t sign up for this,” Hartman said. “They’re the cream of the crop. They’re highly trained … they came in with a specific, particular expertise, whether that’s intelligence, terrorism, cyber, white-collar crime. They come with these backgrounds, and then it’s really demoralizing for them to now start rounding up immigrants.”
Low morale could precipitate “a big brain drain,” with a loss of expertise that could take years to rebuild, Hartman added.
Particularly affected could be initiatives related to white-collar crime, he said.
That’s the line of work that the Department of Justice specifically directed the FBI to de-emphasize as it shifted its focus to immigration.
Hartman says that will mean fewer investigations into fraud — by government and corporations, or within health care and securities.
“To me, this is more than just: ‘All right, we need resources for immigration, so we’re going to take them from white-collar and corruption.’ Every administration can emphasize what they want to enforce,” Hartman said. But “we’ve never seen this in the history of the DOJ, this radical shift in resources.”
In addition to the FBI, a third-party transportation contractor, TransCor, is being used by ICE to pick up immigrants at county jails.
A subsidiary of private prison company CoreCivic, Transcor made headlines last spring when Abelardo Avelleneda-Delgado, an immigrant from Mexico, died during a transfer from Lowndes County Jail to ICE’s Stewart Detention Center in South Georgia.
In Santos Estrada’s case, the FBI’s assistance did not lead to her deportation. According to Telemundo, she was in ICE custody at the agency’s downtown Atlanta field office for about two hours before being released because she had a valid visa.
— AJC reporters Shaddi Abusaid and Stephanie Lamm contributed to this report.
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