Georgia Police Arrest Farmworkers — Then Get Warrants From DHS

On a muggy evening in mid-May, Lorenzo Sarabia Morales was driving home with his co-worker from a 12-hour shift at a poultry farm when the lights of a Georgia State Patrol car flashed behind him. Sarabia and his co-worker, Abraham Mendez Luna, were both concerned about recent rumors of Immigration and Customs Enforcement activity in Moultrie, an agricultural town in southwest Georgia’s Colquitt County. But as they pulled over to the side of the road, they didn’t sense any immediate danger. These seemed to be police officers, not federal agents, and Sarabia hadn’t been speeding.

What the men didn’t know was that they were about to be swept up in a stunning wave of targeted yet imprecise immigration enforcement. At the time, the Trump administration claimed it was after violent criminals who posed serious threats — so the men, who had no criminal records, were shocked when they were arrested and transferred to Stewart Detention Center, a privately owned ICE facility notorious for allegations of abuse and neglect.

The Colquitt County Sheriff’s Office presented the night’s arrests as a successful collaboration between the sheriff’s investigations unit, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Georgia State Police. The operation’s primary goal, as the sheriff’s office put it in a May 13 press release posted on Facebook, was to serve warrants against 11 people for crimes against children.

Through interviews, press statements, and emails concerning Sarabia and Mendez’s case, The Intercept found a gulf between how the Colquitt County Sheriff’s Office presented the operation to the public and what actually happened. Rather than serving existing criminal warrants, local authorities conducted traffic stops, arrested people without licenses, and sent information about the detainees to DHS. Only then, after the men were in custody, did the federal agency issue warrants for their arrest.

Ronald Jordan, a lieutenant at the Colquitt County Sheriff’s Office, told The Intercept in a statement that 19 people were arrested across Moultrie on the night of May 12, and that DHS placed immigration detainers on 13 of them.

“The 13 detainers issued by DHS were received after the subjects were taken into custody,” Jordan wrote.

Georgia State Patrol and DHS did not respond to a request for comment.

“The people we’ve spoken with so far were randomly pulled over or profiled and just arrested on the spot, either for not having a driver’s license or for no charge at all,” said Meredyth Yoon, an attorney with Asian Americans Advancing Justice–Atlanta who has been investigating the May 12 operation. “That’s not a targeted operation based on people having outstanding warrants.”

“The 13 detainers issued by DHS were received after the subjects were taken into custody.”

There was some effort to serve existing warrants from DHS, the sheriff’s office wrote in its release. But the operation hit a snag when “information regarding the presence of DHS personnel began circulating on social media,” forcing DHS to end the operation early. 

Rather than abandon their efforts entirely, the sheriff’s office wrote, officers shifted to a “concentrated patrol throughout Colquitt County,” during which they arrested people with charges ranging from child molestation to false imprisonment and methamphetamine possession. 

Sarabia and Mendez did not have any such charges — nor did at least three more men arrested and transferred to ICE custody, Yoon said.

According to Jordan, “Only one person on the original target list wound up being detained during the operation.”

The May 12 operation was mired in secrecy and confusion. Yoon told The Intercept she tried to obtain the Colquitt County Sheriff’s incident reports from that night, but a records clerk said there weren’t any.

“They didn’t write any reports in cases that day where ICE was involved, even in cases where the person was arrested by local police and charged locally with a traffic offense,” Yoon said.

Sarabia and Mendez’s arrest bore the classic signs of a pretextual traffic stop, Yoon said. The state troopers cycled through a series of reasons for pulling the car over, all of which Sarabia denies — he had been swerving, he was on his cellphone, he wasn’t wearing a seatbelt — then finally arrested him on a charge of driving without a license and failure to maintain lane.

Though neither man had a criminal warrant, and Mendez was never charged with a crime, the cops detained both men that night at the crowded Colquitt County Jail. 

“At the briefing before the operation, all deputies and troopers were informed that any traffic stop made as part of the operation would have to [be] based upon probable cause,” Jordan wrote in an email to The Intercept. “Abrahama Mendez-Luna [sic] had no criminal charges which make be [sic] believe he was a passenger in the vehicle.”

Sarabia’s family paid a $900 bond, but instead of being released, he was placed on an ICE hold. Yoon sent a letter with two National Immigration Project lawyers urging the local sheriff to release Mendez. “Neither Georgia nor federal law nor the Constitution provides any authority to hold an individual for DHS who has no detainer and is not charged with any offense,” they wrote. 

It was too late: By the time Colquitt County Sheriff Rod Howell received the letter, Sarabia and Mendez were already in ICE custody, en route to Stewart Detention Center.

In the days following Sarabia and Mendez’s arrests, videos of other farmworkers arrested on their way home from work in Moultrie spread across social media. But at the United Farm Workers Foundation, Sarabia’s arrest in particular raised red flags.

Sarabia has been a leader on farmworker advocacy campaigns for the past two years, speaking out about extreme heat conditions on south Georgia farms. In 2023, he submitted testimony to the Department of Labor as part of the UFW Foundation’s comment on a proposed to improve working conditions for laborers on temporary agricultural visas. (That rule went into effect last year, but the Trump administration suspended enforcement of all its provisions on June 20.)

“We’ve had other leaders that have been vocal in the past, but none like Lorenzo. Lorenzo has been our most known and visible leader so far,” said Alma Salazar Young, Georgia state director at the UFW Foundation, the nonprofit arm of the United Farm Workers Union. “I wouldn’t put it past them to target labor leaders, and especially with Lorenzo being front and center of a campaign for heat regulations.”

Young pointed to other immigration enforcement actions this year that have targeted farmworkers and UFW leaders, such as the Border Patrol raids in California’s agricultural Central Valley in January. That operation sparked a Fourth Amendment lawsuit against DHS and Border Patrol, filed by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of the UFW and five Kern County residents. In April, a judge granted the ACLU’s motion for a preliminary injunction and barred Border Patrol from conducting warrantless immigration arrests in the region. In May, The Intercept reported that ICE had arrested 14 farmworkers in western New York, several of whom had been involved in prominent UFW organizing efforts. 

“We’ve seen a sharp increase this year in immigration enforcement operations that have targeted immigrant workers, especially in rural areas,” said Zenaida Huerta, government affairs coordinator at the UFW Foundation. The backlash against that increase — recent polling shows that less than a quarter of Americans support deporting immigrants who haven’t committed any crimes — appeared to have some effect on the administration’s priorities: On June 12, Trump vowed to stop dragnet roundups of farmworkers. 

Whether the administration adheres to that promise remains to be seen, but it didn’t arrive in time for Abraham Mendez Luna. At an immigration court hearing on June 25, Mendez requested voluntary departure to Mexico, where he’ll be reunited with his wife and children. Since he didn’t receive a deportation order, Mendez hopes his choice will allow him to return to the U.S. one day.

Sarabia, a husband and father of two who has been in the U.S. for nearly a decade, is fighting his deportation. At a recent hearing, the judge agreed to postpone Sarabia’s pleadings until August 19 to allow him more time to find a lawyer.

“Even though he’s not a citizen of the U.S., I do consider him to be a model citizen,” said UFW Foundation’s Young. “He works hard, takes care of his family, and we think he has a pretty good chance of winning his case. But we don’t really know.”

The events in Colquitt County underscore the risks of deputizing state and local police officers to act as immigration enforcement agents, legal advocates told The Intercept. The 287(g) program, which has become increasingly widespread as the Trump administration enacts its mass deportation agenda, offers states and municipalities three models for empowering local law enforcement to carry out immigration operations. Georgia is among the states that have emerged as 287(g) hotspots. 

Government watchdogs have long warned that the 287(g) program lacks oversight policies, making it ripe for abuse. 

Last year, after an undocumented immigrant killed 22-year-old Laken Riley in Athens, Georgia, Republican Gov. Brian Kemp signed a law mandating that local police departments enter into memorandums of agreement with DHS, including through the 287(g) program. 

The Georgia Department of Corrections has held an agreement with DHS since 2020 under the program’s Jail Enforcement Model, which deputizes corrections officers in local jails to identify undocumented immigrants and turn them over to ICE custody. In March, Kemp expanded the state’s collaboration to the Department of Public Safety — this time under the Task Force Model, which allows Georgia State Patrol officers to act as “force multipliers” for ICE. 

Jordan, the lieutenant, said the Colquitt County Sheriff does not have its own 287(g) agreement with DHS, but it acts in accordance with state and federal law.

As those agreements have come into effect, arrests of undocumented immigrants have surged. 

“Being undocumented in the U.S doesn’t make you a criminal. It’s a civil violation. It’s no different than getting a traffic ticket.”

“The Task Force Model is different from jail-based enforcement, because they actually deputize officers to go out into the streets and make arrests,” said Yoon, the Asian Americans Advancing Justice–Atlanta attorney. “We’re still looking into what the training entails, but we’ve been told that it’s a kind of online-based, expedited program — so a little concerning to be deputizing officers to go make immigration arrests with just an online course.”

Tracy Gonzalez, Georgia state director of American Families United, said that the uptick in local law enforcement activities in collaboration with ICE has pushed communities into hiding.

“Being undocumented in the U.S doesn’t make you a criminal. It’s a civil violation. It’s no different than getting a traffic ticket,” Gonzalez said. “You have hardworking people that deserve a path to citizenship, and it’s time.” 

Colquitt County is in Georgia’s top region for agricultural production. The estimated 40,000 laborers in the area harvesting food for the rest of Georgia and the United States, working out in the open, are easy targets for ICE raids.

“From California to Georgia, local police departments are increasingly coordinating with DHS and ICE and funneling people into detention through everyday traffic stops or license checkpoints,” said Huerta, the UFW Foundation coordinator. “What we see in this case mirrors what we’re seeing across the country, where farmworkers are being caught in the crosshairs of a system that offers them no protection, no matter how essential they are.”

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