Rep. Buddy Carter (R-GA), who is running for a Georgia U.S. Senate seat this year, is calling for a greater Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) presence in Atlanta, as the law enforcement agency continues its crackdown in Minneapolis amid massive unrest. 

“The days of President Joe Biden’s soft-on-crime, open-border policies — supported by Democratic Georgia Sens. Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock — are over, but we are still dealing with the consequences,” Carter wrote in an op-ed for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, a day before an armed man named Alex Pretti was shot and killed by federal officers in Minnesota. 

Carter pointed to the arrests of several violent illegal immigrants in the Atlanta area, as well as a report from the Migration Policy Institute indicating that nearly 500,000 illegal immigrants live in his home state, “giving it the sixth highest rate of illegal immigration nationwide — a more than 45 percent increase since 2018.”

“We’ve seen the success of federal intervention in other Democratic-run cities. Since President Donald Trump deployed ICE agents to Minneapolis as part of Operation Metro Surge, 3,000 illegal immigrants have been arrested — including murderers, rapists, gang members, and perpetrators of fraud,” he wrote. “That is what happens when you give a problem the attention and resources it deserves — you start to see results.”

“It’s time we took aim at Atlanta’s migrant crime problem. We can’t wait for a repeat of the tragedy of Laken Riley — the nursing student killed near the University of Georgia in 2024 by a Venezuelan immigrant who entered the U.S. illegally — to spark change,” he added. This should be a bipartisan effort, and I am calling on Sens. Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, along with the entire Georgia congressional delegation, to join me in this effort to make our city safe again. Under the leadership of President Donald Trump, we can get this done.”

After the shooting death of 37-year-old Pretti on Saturday, protesters gathered in Savannah, Georgia, to protest ICE. When reached for comment, Carter told a local television station that “ICE has every right to defend itself.”

“The violence we are seeing against law enforcement is the direct result of politicians like Jon Ossoff who demonize them for doing their job to keep our cities safe. If ICE wasn’t in Minneapolis, the 12,000 criminals that they’ve removed would still roam free, leading to much more violence than what we are seeing on the streets today,” he said in a statement. 

On Monday, Carter again pushed for a larger ICE presence in Atlanta.

“The worst of the worst criminal illegals are in Atlanta. Let’s be clear: Democrats like Jon Ossoff created this crisis with their open-borders policies,” he wrote in a post to X. “It’s time to send ICE to Atlanta so we can get these criminals off our streets. Arrest them. Deport them. Enforce the law.”

Carter, a pharmacist and longtime GOP lawmaker representing the state’s 1st congressional district, is running in the GOP U.S. Senate Georgia primary against Rep. Mike Collins (R-GA), who represents Georgia’s 10th congressional district and owns his own trucking company, and Gov. Brian Kemp (R)-endorsed Derek Dooley, a first-time candidate, former University of Tennessee football coach, and lawyer. All three are vying for the chance to unseat vulnerable far-left Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-GA) who was first elected in 2021 runoff.

Both Carter and Collins are hoping to secure an endorsement from President Donald Trump, who has already endorsed several candidates in the Peach State. Collins has consistently led in polling, with his RealClear Politics (RCP) average showing him leading his competitors by more than eight points, followed by Carter, then Dooley.