US service member guards illegal immigrants at major airport

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The breadth of complicity in this atrocity is mind boggling.

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Police and service members are going to have to have a come to Jesus meeting to determine what side they are actually on in this fight.

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A group of Georgia volunteers that has helped immigrants navigate Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport since 2020 was cast as a human trafficking operation in social media posts by a Georgia state senator.

On Jan. 31, Sen. Colton Moore visited a room on the second floor of the Atlanta airport’s domestic terminal, where a local nonprofit assists immigrants who have been cleared to fly. He filmed himself asking questions to a volunteer about who the immigrants were.

In a subsequent tweet about his experience, Moore, a Trenton Republican, said he uncovered a “human trafficking operation of unimaginable size” and that Georgia “borders are being breached.” The post went viral. Three days later, the state senator was interviewed on national television by Fox News’ Lawrence Jones III about Hartsfield-Jackson’s “hidden room.”

“Some shady business going down,” Jones said at the end of the segment.

Despite the recent surge in attention, the immigrant assistance at the Atlanta airport isn’t new. Nor does it have connections to human trafficking. Managed by the nonprofit Team Libertad, volunteers like the one filmed by Moore welcome immigrants who get dropped off at the airport by staff from Stewart Detention Center, a South Georgia immigrant jail. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution published a profile of this group of volunteers’ work at the airport in 2021, when the nonprofit at the helm was called Casa Alterna.

The immigrants the group helps were held at Stewart after crossing the Mexico border. They are allowed to travel to join families and friends across the U.S. Volunteers help them navigate the airport and board their flights.

“We are very proud of their professionalism,” Andrea Espinoza, program coordinator at Team Libertad, said of the volunteers caught on Moore’s camera.

“Team Libertad is proud to offer this volunteer service and being a friendly and helpful presence in Atlanta, the city too busy to hate.”

In his tweet, Moore called the immigrants at the airport “illegal aliens.” In the video he shot, a Team Libertad volunteer called them “recently documented.”

In truth, the former Stewart detainees are unauthorized immigrants who were taken in by U.S. border authorities. They are in deportation proceedings, and are released on the condition that they attend regular check-ins with U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE). They must ultimately show up to immigration court, where they can make a case to be allowed to stay in the U.S. Because of big backlogs of cases in immigration courts countrywide, the immigrants will probably be able to live in the country for years.

Moore did not respond to calls from The Atlanta Journal-Constitution seeking comment for this report.

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