Editor’s Note: Last June, we published the first part of an essay analyzing both the historic and modern harms caused by Atlanta legacy paper The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Here, we have published the second part of that essay, which has been updated for timeliness.
On January 26, 2026, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (AJC), Atlanta’s most prominent legacy daily newspaper, published an opinion article penned by Republican House representative Earl L. “Buddy” Carter titled, “We need more ICE presence in Georgia.” It was published shortly after the murder of Keith Porter by an off-duty ICE agent in Los Angeles on December 31, 2025, and the ICE murder of Renee Good in Minneapolis on January 7, 2026. The opinion article ran one day before the brutal execution of Alex Pretti by ICE in Minneapolis.
Atlanta communities had already begun reporting increased ICE presence since mid-January. Citizens have reported sightings of black window-tinted SUVs with “ICE” decals on Ted Turner Drive, federal agents staging at local shopping centers, and a new satellite office for ICE in South Atlanta. This highlights how Carter’s article is emblematic of the racist, sensationalist opinion publishing in the AJC that has long been a bipartisan tool for manufacturing consent for an expanded police state. I covered this long history in part one of this analysis, which connected the paper’s pro-Cop City publishing to the historic harms caused by the AJC’s predecessors, the Atlanta Journal and the Atlanta Constitution, that directly incited the historic 1906 Atlanta Race Massacre. Since the construction of Cop City in Atlanta, at least 77 other similar facilities have reportedly been approved and/or are being built across the U.S. This indicates a deadly trend implicating The Atlanta Way’s influence in carceral infrastructures that far exceed the city’s limits…