Garrison Davis

Yeah.

And so, you know, a lot of these people, I mean, I've just described the demographic.

I think many of them have never been involved in organizing of any kind before.

Some of them have, I think, but I think due to, you know, their life circumstances just might not have found themselves in a place where they've needed to organize for anything.

So a bunch of these residents got together and have been holding, you know, in-person kind of town hall community meetings.

And they held one in January where they were about, you know, I think 40 to 50 people together.

in the room and they wanted to get together and, you know, just have a public discourse about what could be done.

And I was invited to this meeting because of my history of involvement with shutdown campaigns here in Georgia.

I got started with shutdown campaigns in 2020 when a nurse, a whistleblower who worked at an immigration detention center here in Georgia called the Irwin County Detention Center, alerted the public that there was a doctor who was contracting with ICE

who had been, you know, providing medical services to women detained in this facility, well, he had actually been performing non-consensual and medically unnecessary medical and gynecological procedures on women in ICE detention.

I remember this, yeah.

Yeah.

And when these women spoke out about it to their family members, to journalists, to their lawyers, to members of Congress, or staffers for members of Congress, they were retaliated against by being swiftly deported.

Yeah.

And I'm talking put on planes within hours of speaking to a congressional staffer.

And at the time, I was working at the University of Georgia School of Law's First Amendment Clinic, where we were providing free legal services to people across the state, including helping people with getting access to public records and suing the police and federal agents when they were retaliated against.

And so...

We represented those women, and it was through my work at Irwin and, you know, connecting with the organizers there that I got involved with shutdown campaigns, or rather the shutdown Irwin campaign here in Georgia, and then from there later got involved with the shutdown Folkestone campaign.

So I had been asked to speak to this group of people who I think were new to the immigrants' rights struggle to talk about, you know, what it's like to try to prevent a detention center from popping up in their community.

And like you say, it's not a community that might traditionally be demographically the same as the people who we associate with, like migrant advocacy, migrant activism.