Angel Ivan Chavez Salas was arrested outside his Decatur home on August 16 in front of his child, according to his immigration attorney, Peter Isbister. Chavez Salas, a father of two with no criminal history, is now being held at the D. Ray James Processing Center in southeast Georgia, more than 200 miles from the DeKalb County community where his family lives.
Isbister, an attorney with Diaz and Gaeta who lives in Decatur, told WABE that Chavez Salas's young son was briefly handcuffed during the arrest and witnessed his father being taken into custody. Chavez Salas came to the United States from Peru on a visa in 2016, fleeing political persecution, and applied for asylum protection within the one-year filing deadline. Isbister said that application has been pending for nearly ten years.
Isbister said it remains unclear whether Chavez Salas's detention counts as a so-called collateral arrest — the term used when immigration agents detain someone who was not the original target of an enforcement action during a search. He has worked with other families who felt they needed to go into hiding because of pressure from ICE, and he said Chavez Salas is among many noncriminal immigrants swept into custody across the country as ICE arrests of people with no criminal charges have spiked over the past month, according to reporting cited by the New York Times.
A Bureaucratic Snag Complicates the Case
Adding to the family's uncertainty, the Department of Homeland Security initially filed Chavez Salas's charges at Stewart Detention Center in Lumpkin instead of Folkston, an administrative error that means his case will now need to be filed in a different court before it can proceed. That misfiling lands amid renewed scrutiny of Stewart, a 1,752-bed facility operated by CoreCivic where Senator Raphael Warnock and a group of U.S. House members conducted oversight visits this August, citing rising detainee deaths and raising alarms over unsanitary water and inadequate basic medical care, according to the Office of Senator Raphael Warnock.
The facility where Chavez Salas is actually held, D. Ray James, was consolidated into the Folkston ICE Processing Center after a $47 million federal contract expansion awarded to The GEO Group last year, growing it to nearly 3,000 beds and making it one of the largest immigration detention centers in the country, per Capitol Beat. That expansion moved forward despite a Department of Homeland Security Inspector General report that had identified mold growth, insect infestations, lack of hot meals, and delayed medical care at the facility, as documented by The Current GA.
A bond hearing for Chavez Salas was scheduled for Monday, August 31. His legal options may be strengthened by a landmark ruling the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals issued in May, which found that noncitizens arrested in the U.S. interior are governed by federal bond-hearing statutes and are entitled to an individualized hearing before an immigration judge — a decision Hoodline previously reported shook up Southern lockups. Nationally, federal district judges in roughly 50 courts had ruled against DHS in more than 350 of 362 habeas corpus petitions filed by interior-detained noncitizens seeking bond by mid-2026, according to Law & Crime.
Classmates Turn Grief Into a Fundraiser
Word of Chavez Salas's detention reached Decatur High School, where students Samuel Stevens, Miles Bryant, Jon Luka Temelkran, Elija Hall, Rohr Gillan and Mac Beeson started a GoFundMe for the family. The students also created an Instagram page and flyers to promote the fundraiser, and discussed potentially organizing a car wash with Principal Duane Sprull. As of the campaign's latest count, the GoFundMe had drawn more than 200 donors and raised nearly $12,000.
Chavez Salas's wife told him about the community and financial support pouring in, and he reacted by crying when he learned of it, the family reported. The Decatur Education Foundation, which supports Decatur students, has provided the family with fresh meals three times a week and helped connect them with Isbister. Executive Director Meagan Berardi said the situation was a first for the organization.
State Law and a Wider Enforcement Push
The case unfolds against the backdrop of Georgia's HB 1105, the Criminal Alien Track and Report Act signed by Governor Brian Kemp in 2024, which requires state and local law enforcement agencies and detention facilities to verify immigration statuses and honor 48-hour ICE detainers, according to the Hines Law Firm. The law also imposes misdemeanor penalties and the loss of state funding on local governments that adopt sanctuary policies, and it has fed a climate in which Hoodline has previously reported that routine traffic stops can end in ICE transfers.
Chavez Salas's arrest also comes as the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has set a goal of 2,000 arrests per day nationwide. ICE recently concluded a statewide sweep called Operation Safe Community – Atlanta, which resulted in 1,226 arrests across Georgia, more than 700 of whom federal authorities said had prior criminal charges or convictions, according to figures Hoodline reported in its coverage of the statewide arrest total. Immigrants facing civil deportation proceedings in Georgia have no constitutional right to a court-appointed attorney, and the state's main ICE facilities in Folkston and Lumpkin sit more than 130 miles from Atlanta's legal aid organizations, a distance that WABE has reported forces pro-bono immigration lawyers to travel hours to meet detained clients.
Locally, the case also reflects ongoing division over immigration enforcement in DeKalb County. In February, the DeKalb County Board of Commissioners rejected, in a 4-3 vote, a nonbinding resolution calling on federal immigration agents to halt tactical enforcement operations in residential areas — a measure that would also have opposed local detention warehouses and funded an analysis of the community impact of ICE operations, as Hoodline reported at the time in its account of the board's narrow vote.
