Data from the Baldwin County Sheriff’s Office offers some insight into the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) presence here in Milledgeville and Baldwin County.
In 2025, ICE agents took roughly three dozen inmates at the Baldwin County Sheriff’s Office into custody, according to the data. However, ICE declined to pick up the majority of inmates identified as “illegal aliens,” which is the verbiage used in the state law. Of the 178 times that an illegal alien was booked at the county jail in 2025, ICE agents declined custody 140 times. In other words, illegal aliens at the county jail were not transported to ICE detention centers 79 percent of the time.
“We don’t know what (ICE’s) criteria is, and they don’t tell us,” said Chief Deputy Scott Deason. “We just do what we are mandated to do by law.”
Deason added the vast majority of illegal alien arrests in Baldwin County are related to “either driving without a license situations or domestic situations.”
Even if ICE declines custody, the criminal cases continue through the court system at a local level.
Baldwin County has a small Hispanic population, relative to a county of its size. The Census Bureau most recently placed Baldwin’s Hispanic population at 2.9 percent, which ranks 128th of 159 counties in Georgia.
BCSO data reporting is all part of House Bill 1105, officially known as the Georgia Criminal Alien Track and Reporting Act of 2024. HB 1105 requires that all jails provide “status verification” for its inmates. If an inmate is booked and records can’t confirm the inmate is an American citizen, jail staffers will ask for a work visa, student visa or passport. If none of those documents are produced, jail staffers submit an “inquiry” to ICE, which is required to provide verification and a “response” within 48 hours.
HB 1105 also requires that law enforcement agencies update their data every month and make the data public. The data for Baldwin County appears as a web page on the BCSO’s website.
“Sanctuary cities” were the primary driver of HB 1105, and HB 1105 aims to make it tougher for certain law enforcement agencies to withhold information about the legal status of its inmates. Immigration remains a hot-button topic, as well as a very partisan and polarizing one. Deason confirmed it occasionally comes up in conversation. “People will ask me if we are ‘working with ICE.’ The answer is that ‘we are abiding by state law,’” he said. “We’re not going up to job sites or going doorto- door to see if someone is here illegally. We don’t have the staff for that, and we already have enough on our plate. But, we are following the law.”