Atlanta Mayor Closes City Jail, Citing Rising Costs

ATLANTA, GA — Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms signed legislation closing the Atlanta City Detention Center, according to reports. The closure comes months after the mayor said the city's detention center would stop accepting detainees to hold for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE.

Increasing operating costs, alongside with a decline in the number of detainees, were the mayor's stated reasons for shutting down the facility reports say.

The announcement to close the detention center came last week, WSB-TV reported.

"We have taken another critical step forward in the march for criminal justice reform by beginning the work to repurpose our jail to serve the people of Atlanta as a Center for Equity," Bottoms said in a release, CBS reported.

In September, Bottoms signed an executive order directing the city's Department of Corrections to stop receiving those detainees, which the city had been doing under an agreement with the U.S. Marshals Service.

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"As we work to achieve our vision of an Atlanta that is welcoming and inclusive, with equal opportunity for all, it is untenable for our city to be complicit in the inhumane immigration policies that have led to the separation of hundreds of families at the United States southern border," Bottoms said in a news release in September.

See a PDF covering the doctrine of the Atlanta City Detention Center.

The mayor has stood up a task force to explore how the facility could be used for a community-based purpose, the CBS report said.

See more on Patch:

• Atlanta To Feds: No More ICE Detainees Here
• Second Immigrant Dies In ICE Custody In Georgia