Georgia state and local police may start enforcing one of the most controversial parts of the state’s immigration law for the first time now that a federal judge has lifted an injunction he placed against it.
The statute — nicknamed by critics as “the show-me-your-papers law” — gives police the option to investigate the immigration status of certain suspects. It also empowers police to detain people determined to be in the country illegally and take them to jail.
Partly modeled after a similar measure in Arizona, Georgia’s law is aimed at protecting taxpayer resources by pushing illegal immigrants out of the state. Georgia has the ninth-largest population among states. But it ranked sixth last year for the estimated number of illegal immigrants living within its borders, at 440,000, according to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
U.S. District Judge Thomas Thrash placed Georgia’s law on hold before it could go into effect last year after civil and immigrant rights activists sued to block it. Critics say the statute is unconstitutional and that it could interfere with the nation’s foreign diplomacy. They also say it could lead to racial profiling even though the statute explicitly prohibits that.

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