The Eatonton Messenger sat down with Putnam County Sheriff Howard R. Sills to find out how or if he anticipates his office will be affected by President Donald Trump’s proclamation to close the southern border and deport undocumented residents who reside in or pass through Putnam County.
“We’ve got to do something; you can’t just let thousands of people cross the border,” Sills said as he began the conversation. “We really can’t appreciate the difficulty on the border, we just can’t. You’d have to talk to my colleagues who are on the border to understand the problem better.”
Regarding Trump “rounding up all these people,” Sills said the federal government is not capable of doing that.
“Their bureaucracy is such that it’s impossible,” he opined. “What they need to concentrate on is deporting all these criminals. That’s what they need to do, and that’s what I think he will do.”
Political asylum
Sills noted that in the past, anyone who was in another country and wanted to claim political asylum would go to the U.S. consulate or embassy in that country to do so.
“You didn’t wade across the Rio Grande, and the first person you saw claimed political asylum,” he said.
Sills said he wasn’t sure exactly when that practice changed, but “there have been millions to cross the border during the previous administration.”
“And these are the ones that they know about,” he said. “God knows how many they do not know about. Because almost exclusively everyone that we have dealt with here from a criminal standpoint did not claim political asylum. The American public doesn’t understand any of this.”
I.C.E. dealings
Sills said he has not received any calls from Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and doesn’t expect to be called “unless we have somebody they want.”
He explained that the previous four years of enforcement vastly differed from when President Barack Obama and President George W. Bush were in office. Then, anyone who was convicted of a felony was deported, or sent to prison first and then deported when they were released.
“And when we would arrest somebody who had perpetrated a felony, I.C.E. would automatically put a hold on them because I always notified them,” he said. “And if they put a hold on them, then we honor that hold just like we would if the sheriff of any other county put a hold on them. And if we encountered a person who I.C.E. wanted, we would apprehend them and detain them just like we would if we encountered somebody who the New York City Police Department or Atlanta Police Department wanted. We’ve always done that.”
New laws
After the murder of Laken Riley last year in Athens-Clarke County, Georgia laws added or amended in 2024 include Georgia Code Titles 35, 36, 42, and 45, which require local law enforcement agencies and penal institutions to enter into agreements with federal agencies for the enforcement of immigration laws, prohibit immigration sanctuary cities, honor immigration detainer notices, revise required reporting requirements, collect DNA, etc.
Sills said he has always notified I.C.E. if he or his deputies encountered a wanted person.
“We’ve been doing that all along; we’ve never not done it,” he explained.
“Every individual that we encounter in the day-to-day work that we deal with, we’re going to check that person to see if they’re wanted — wanted by the FBI, the U.S. Marshal, or wanted by the Sparta Police Department. If I.C.E. wants them, we’ll get the same kind of response, and we’ll hold them.”
However, the updated amendments to legislature require local law enforcement agencies to report to the Georgia Dept. of Audits every illegal person they come in contact with, what happened during the encounter, “and stuff like that,” Sills said.
“We’ve always contacted them, but now our legislature has passed this onerous task on us that we’ve got to start keeping these records,” he added.
“And it’s only because a couple of Georgia sheriffs were not doing what they were supposed to do. I would suggest that they put those two sheriffs in jail and leave the rest of us alone because we’ve got more than we can do already.”
The obstacles
Georgia Code 42 requires officials of jails or detention centers to “make a reasonable effort within 48 hours of a person’s arrival to determine the person's nationality and [if] they are an illegal alien.”
Sills recalled two cases in the past two years and some this month in which his deputies encountered suspects or victims who had trouble learning their immigration status, the history of where they’d been, or how they got to Putnam County.
As he attempted to explain the situation, he paused mid-sentence to laugh incredulously.
“Understand this,” he said. “We cannot check. If I arrest you today, and you’re an American citizen and you’ve been arrested before in the last three or four decades, when systems work right, we have access to that information. But we don’t have access to that information anywhere else. We don’t know what kind of record you have in Guatemala; we don’t know what you’ve done in Germany.
“I’ll give you a great example — back when the Nuwaubians were here, I encountered a South African national during those investigations. The protocol at the time was that if you wanted information or criminal history, you requested Interpol, which I did for that individual. Do you know when I got my reply? Fourteen years later.
“When people say we’re not vetting these individuals, there’s no way to vet them,” he said, his voice got louder in emphasis. “There’s a way to vet a German national, but the process of doing it takes too long. But these third world countries, banana republics, and communist places, there’s no checking anybody unless we have some kind of relationship with this other country.”