ATLANTA, Ga.–“Pastor, can we send our children to school?” That’s the current refrain from parishioners of Iglesia Penuel Mission in Duluth, Georgia, says Pastor Jay Kim, whose church serves the Atlanta suburb’s large immigrant Latino population.
Kim’s remarks come just days after a series of ICE raids across Metro Atlanta, including one that targeted a church, sewing fear among migrant families nationwide.
Members of Atlanta’s API community have stepped up in response.
“We are organizing temporary shelters for immigrants who have been kicked out due to the immigration raids,” notes Kim, who is ethnic Korean but was raised in Paraguay and Argentina and speaks fluent Spanish. “They need a roof from the rain.”
Kim’s church is located along Buford Highway, a 30-mile stretch of road in metro Atlanta that is a hub for the city’s large immigrant community, with restaurants and other businesses catering to the area’s expansive diversity.
“Latinos are neighbors of our Korean American community. In the workplace and at home, Latinos are indispensable to Korean American immigrants,” he says. “Many Koreans help them invisibly.”
Atlanta is home to one of the country’s largest Korean communities, second only to Los Angeles, as well as one the nation’s largest Latino populations.
Reporting by Telemundo notes arrests during the past week’s raids took place along Buford Highway as well as other Atlanta neighborhoods.
The Drug Enforcement Administration’s Atlanta division along with the FBI issued statements acknowledging their involvement with the raids. “The FBI, along with our Department of Justice partners, is assisting DHS and other federal law enforcement partners with their immigration enforcement efforts.”
Several thousand migrants were deported during the first week of Trump’s presidency, according to reports. At least half of those deported had no criminal record despite assurances from the administration that it would only target individuals with a criminal past.
According to the Washington Post, the administration has now issued quotas to ICE agents seeking to increase the number of daily deportations to at least 1,200 to 1,500.
“This is a time for solidarity,” says Lily Pabian, executive director of the non-profit We Love Buford Highway, which works to preserve the area’s multicultural identity. “We have to realize that at any point this could shift to other communities.”
Pointing to refugees and asylum seekers, who Trump has also targeted for deportation, Pabian stresses, “This is a time for us all to be very real about what’s happening and the potential of where this could go.”
The area around Buford Highway first emerged as an immigrant enclave some 50 years earlier, a time of growing opportunity thanks to the expansion of the region’s auto industry, explains Pabian.
“A lot of immigrant communities rose up, bringing with them their entrepreneurial spirit to build small businesses,” she says.
That spirt helped spur Atlanta’s economic growth. Immigrants—including unauthorized migrants—contribute approximately $9 billion in tax revenue to the city each year and are 41% more likely to start a business compared to their US-born counterparts.
Despite their contributions, immigrants have often had to confront waves of racism and xenophobia, Pabian says, including during the Covid 19 pandemic when the API community became a target of hate, the most disturbing example of which came in 2021 after a mass shooting that targeted Asian owned spas in the city.
“It was like September 11 for us,” says Pabian of the lasting scars from that period, adding the experience engendered a sense of solidarity and empathy that is now being extended to the Latino migrant population. “Since the ICE raids, we see another community being marginalized… empathy is very important.”
In the meantime, fear and anxiety continue to ripple across communities here.
“Many immigrant parents will stop sending their children to school,” says Kim, “and there will be more cases of laborers not paid for their work. Immigrant women who are victims of violence will also be reluctant to go to the police.”
For his part, Kim acknowledges there is little he can do to stand in the way should agents arrive at his church’s doorstep.
“If I hear that a member of my church has been arrested, I will try to find out how to contact their family. But if ICE wants to arrest undocumented people in my church, I can’t stop them,” he says, noting the absence of “sanctuary churches” in Georgia, which he calls “unfortunate.”
Since the raids, Kim’s church has returned to the Covid era practice of holding online prayer meetings. “We created a chat room with 100 immigrants in it. We post morning and evening prayers in the chat room every day with the goal of praying for 40 days.”
He adds, “We pray on our knees that we will survive the raids.”
Peter Schurmann contributed reporting for this story.
