by Ty Tagami | Aug 11, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA — President Donald Trump has endorsed Lt. Gov. Burt Jones’ bid to become Georgia’s next governor, siding with his long-time ally ahead of Jones’ fight next year for the Republican nomination against state Attorney General Chris Carr.
In a post on his social media platform Monday, Trump credited Jones as an early supporter who had worked “tirelessly” to help his presidential campaigns, and he said Jones had his “complete and total” endorsement.
Jones’ campaign heralded the message.
“From day one, I’ve fought to advance President Trump’s America First agenda right here in Georgia — and I’ve taken plenty of arrows from the radical left for doing it,” Jones said. “But just like President Trump, I don’t back down.”
The endorsement will likely give Jones an edge against Carr in the GOP primary where the president’s MAGA base has repeatedly proven influential. Trump won 85% of the vote in his own 2024 Georgia primary.
Jones also has a big lead in fundraising thanks to a special carve-out in state law for a handful of incumbents like himself.
He and Carr reported raising about $3 million from donors during the last campaign finance filing deadline in July, but Jones pulled far ahead by loaning his campaign another $10 million. As lieutenant governor, Jones can raise unlimited sums through a “leadership committee” allowed under a 2021 law.
That law gives no such advantage to the attorney general, and Carr sued last week in federal court over the way Jones had used his committee. The State Ethics Commission dismissed a similar complaint by Carr last month.
Several prominent Democrats have entered the race. The Democratic primary so far features former Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, state Sen. Jason Esteves, and former DeKalb County CEO and state Labor Commissioner Michael Thurmond.
by Ty Tagami | Aug 11, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA – Another ranking Republican state senator has joined the wide open race to succeed Republican Burt Jones as lieutenant governor.
Sen. Blake Tillery, R-Vidalia, who chairs the Senate Appropriations Committee, announced his candidacy Monday. He touted his experience as a leader in crafting the state budget each year since the COVID-19 pandemic.
Tillery will be campaigning in next year’s GOP primary against two former members of Senate leadership.
Sen. John F. Kennedy, R-Macon, stepped aside as president pro tempore of the Senate in June to run for lieutenant governor. The president pro tem presides over the Senate in the absence of the lieutenant governor, who is elected statewide.
Kennedy outranked Sen. Steve Gooch, R-Dahlonega, who entered the race in May and vacated the role of Senate majority leader.
The three share similar views on big political topics, from immigration to transgender issues to cutting taxes. Tillery will try to separate himself from his colleagues based on his opposition to one issue: “debanking,” something that President Donald Trump also has also opposed.
Trump signed an executive order last week against federal regulators promoting “policies and practices that allow financial institutions to deny or restrict services based on political beliefs, religious beliefs” and lawful activities.
Tillery carried Senate Bill 57 to prohibit debanking during this year’s legislative session. Most Republican senators, including Kennedy, voted against it, and it did not pass.
But Gooch voted for it.
Voters may have a hard time parsing these candidates based on policy.
“I know in the end, Georgians vote for the person they trust,” said Tillery, who flew to several cities around the state to kick off his campaign in person Monday.
Other Republican candidates include Jerry Timbs II of Griffin, who ran for Henry County Commission in 2016, and Takosha Swan of Conyers, who was appointed by Gov. Brian Kemp to the board of the state Department of Veterans Service in 2019 after running unsuccessfully for the state House of Representatives.
Neither reported raising significant campaign funds — Swan with $1,500 and Timbs with no money as of the last campaign reporting deadline July 8.
They lag far behind the three GOP leaders — Gooch with $1 million, Kennedy with $819,000, and Tillery with $759,000.
State Sen. Josh McLaurin from Sandy Springs has raised the most among Democrats. He reported netting $118,000, far behind the Republicans but well ahead of the other Democrat, Richard N. Wright, with $20,000.
by Dave Williams | Aug 11, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA – An investigation led by U.S. Sen. Jon Ossoff, D-Ga., has uncovered 510 credible reports of human rights abuses at immigration detention centers across the country.
The list included 14 credible reports of mistreatment of pregnant women and 18 credible reports of mistreatment of children.
“These detention facilities … are no place for children or pregnant women,” Ossoff said Monday during a news conference to call attention to a report on abuses of immigration detainees released by his office. “It is within our power as citizens to stop this. We can shine a light on it.”
“What is happening now is far worse than what was happening in the first Trump administration,” added pediatrician Dr. Marsha Griffin, cofounder, president and CEO of the nonprofit Community for Children, who appeared with Ossoff on behalf of the American Academy of Pediatrics. “We must end this shameful practice.”
The investigation of immigration detention facilities across 25 states and Puerto Rico, at U.S. military bases, and on chartered deportation flights turned up human rights abuses including deaths in custody, physical and sexual abuse, mistreatment of pregnant women and children, inadequate medical care, overcrowding and unsanitary living conditions inadequate food or water, exposure to extreme temperatures, denial of access to attorneys, and family separations.
Griffin said the average length of stay for children held at immigration detention centers is longer than ever.
“No amount of time in detention is safe for a child,” she said. “Even short periods can cause psychiatric harm and long-term physical health problems. … These children are at elevated risk of suicide. Their spirits break.”
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which oversees U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), pushed back at the report’s findings.
“ICE detention facilities have higher standards than most U.S. prisons that detain American citizens,” said DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin. “All detainees are provided with comprehensive medical care, proper meals, and are given the opportunity to call their family members and attorneys. These false allegations are garbage and are part of the reason ICE agents are now facing a 1,000% increase in assaults against them.”
Georgia had the second-highest number of credible reports of physical and sexual abuse of detainees – 13 – below only the 29 reports from Texas, according to the report. The investigation was launched last January to measure reports of abuse since President Donald Trump took office that month.
by Ty Tagami | Aug 8, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA — The closure of schools during COVID-19 caused a massive downshift in attendance as nearly one in four Georgia students simply stopped attending class, double the rate before the pandemic.
Fewer students are routinely cutting class now, but one in five were still deemed “chronically absent” last school year, meaning they missed 10% or more of the school year, typically 180 days.
The problem has caught the attention of state lawmakers.
“That’s 360,000 school children in our public school systems in Georgia that are chronically absent, meaning they are missing 18 days or more of the school year,” said Sen. John F. Kennedy, R-Macon. “They’re not going to learn to read. If they don’t learn to read, they’re not going to be literate. They’re not going to graduate, and they don’t have a chance at the Georgia Dream and the American Dream.”
Kennedy is leading a study committee on this “quiet crisis,” as he called it. That illustrates just how serious the Senate thinks it is. Kennedy was until recently the highest ranking senator but stepped down as president pro tempore to run next year for lieutenant governor, the statewide officer who presides over the Senate.
And the Georgia House of Representatives has its own study committee on the issue.
Many states and school leaders de-emphasized attendance during the worst of the pandemic. By the 2020-21 school year, 31 states and the District of Columbia had reinstated daily attendance-taking, but Georgia was not among them.
The state required attendance to be taken but not on a daily basis, the non-profit initiative Attendance Works reported in 2021.
Hedy Chang, the group’s executive director, testified to Kennedy’s fact-finding committee Thursday about how students are affected by chronic absence.
“They’re less likely to read by the end of the third grade, have lower achievement, even disciplinary issues in middle school,” she said. “They’re more likely to drop out, but it’s not just the academics that are affected; it’s educational engagement, social emotional development, executive functioning.”
Chang said these students affect other students when they are present, creating distractions and making it harder for teachers to keep kids on track. And absenteeism appears to be contagious, she said, with more students missing class by the end of a school year if they start class with students who were chronically absent.
There is a wealth of data about the impact of missing school, starting with academic performance.
In 2024, nearly half of Georgia students who took a Georgia Milestones test in English and math scored at least proficient, but only one in four chronically absent students made that mark in English and just one in five in math.
Chronically absent students are at greater risk of dropping out, which leads to unemployment, lower lifetime earnings, and even a shorter life.
A landmark study published last year found that completing a dozen years of school — about the equivalent of finishing high school — was associated with a 24.5% reduction in mortality risk compared with no education. That translates to a reduced mortality risk of 1.9% per year of education, said the Norway-based study published in The Lancet.
Likely reasons for better health outcomes were higher earnings, better health care, more health knowledge and other “social and psychological resources.”
Lawmakers were given multiple reasons for the increase in absenteeism.
Students are tired because they are working a job to help the family or are effectively raising younger siblings, in some cases because a parent died or was incapacitated during the pandemic. They are falling ill and lack health care. They cannot see or hear well and lack resources for health screenings.
Often students just lack necessities, said Carol Lewis, president and CEO of the group Communities in Schools, a non-profit with the mission of keeping kids in school.
“In one of our communities, it was something as simple as clean clothes, hygiene products, and you can almost track it to the time of the month,” Lewis told the House study committee at its first meeting last month. She added that many kids are still traumatized by the death of a family member during the pandemic.
Garry McGiboney, a former official with the Georgia Department of Education who volunteered his time to lead a statewide attendance study group, said bullying and other contributors to poor school “climate” discourage attendance.
“If students want to be at the school, they will find a way to get to the school,” McGiboney told the Senate committee. “If they want to be at school, it’s because they feel engaged. They feel like somebody cares about them.”
To some, all of this sounds like excuses.
Absenteeism results from “pure unadulterated failure to perform parental duties,” said O. Wayne Ellerbee, a Valdosta lawyer who served four decades as a Lowndes County juvenile court judge. It was a big problem when he became a judge in the mid-1970s, he said, so he implemented a simple solution: he required parents to appear in court after their child had three absences.
“They’d have a 12-, 13-year-old kid and they’d say, ‘Well, judge, I can’t keep up with them 24 hours a day.’ And I said, ‘Well, why in the hell did you have them?’ They would look at me like I was crazy, but they soon learned and soon adapted,” said the former judge, who is not part of the legislative study process but has read about it.
Ellerbee, who retired from the bench in 2012, said that when some of those kids grew up, they relayed to him what their parents had told them: “You got to go to school cause I ain’t going to court.”
He also blamed the schools. Kids who skip can be disruptive when they do attend, and that can be a burden on teachers and administrators, he said. “So they’re not too unhappy when the bad ones don’t come to school.”
But that’s old-school thinking to everyone who has testified so far at the House and Senate hearings.
“We started off using the hammer, which definitely did not work,” State School Superintendent Richard Woods told senators Thursday. Instead, educators should focus on building positive relationships with students, so they can learn why they are skipping school, he said.
“We don’t want to just mask the symptom,” Woods said. “We have to address the real root of the problem.”
That approach appealed to Steven Teske, the former chief juvenile court judge in Clayton County. Teske, who retired from the bench four years ago, led an interagency task force to address absenteeism for nearly two decades.
“I wanted to stop the traditional stuff where there were limited resources, you were put on a diversion plan to go to school, telling kids who aren’t going to school to go to school, which is stupid,” said Teske, who moved to Arizona and has not testified in these hearings. “We know there are issues much deeper that are driving these kids to not go to school. They really don’t give a damn about what an adult is telling them.”
Teske avoided punishing absent kids and their parents, but he said “restorative justice” wasn’t enough. He said he was impressed by an approach that seemed to be effective at one high-poverty high school in Clayton: feeding the kids after classes ended.
“I was just so amazed about the passion of these teachers that were staying there and helping the kids with their homework and feeding them,” he said. “I mean, bringing in Chick-fil-As and stuff like that. Kids didn’t want to go home.”
People who did testify said the state should expect to spend money to address absenteeism. Georgia schools need more social workers, more nurses and other interventions, such as screenings for vision and hearing, lawmakers were told.
Dan Sims, the Bibb County School District superintendent, shared an anecdote with senators that crystallized the challenge. He visited a single mom of four whose fifth grade son, a “cherished” student, had gotten into trouble with the law.
During his 15 minutes with her, one child came down the stairs asking for food, another had a question about the next day and another interrupted the conversation, too, all before the boy, who was outside playing, had returned home.
“I sat and watched her face and the stress that was in her body in that moment,” he said. “And she even mentioned to me, ‘Dr. Sims, it’s just me.’ “
by Dave Williams | Aug 8, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA – A Floyd County man on probation following convictions for making terroristic threats and other crimes was arrested Friday on charges of threatening to assassinate President Donald Trump.
Jauan Rashun Porter, 29, of Rome was jailed pending a hearing in federal court scheduled for Tuesday.
According to information presented in court, Porter joined a TikTok livestream about Trump captioned “Alligator Alcatraz,” an immigration detention facility in the Florida Everglades that opened last month. At one point, Porter allegedly said “So, there’s only one way to make America great and that is putting a bullet in between Trump’s eyes.”
When asked by the livestream host about federal agents coming to his door, Porter allegedly said, “I’m gonna kill them, too.”
“The allegations against Porter are serious and required a swift, decisive, and collaborative response,” U.S. Attorney Theodore S. Hertzberg said. “We do not tolerate threats against public officials or law enforcement officers, and Porter will now face the consequences of his actions.”
A search of Porter’s apartment found Tannerite (an explosive), two pipes, and pistol ammunition. Porter was convicted previously for terroristic threats, influencing a witness, mutiny in a penal institution, drug possession, battery, possession of a firearm by a convicted felon, and domestic violence.
The case is being investigated by the U.S. Secret Service. The Floyd County Police Department, the county District Attorney’s Office, and the Georgia Department of Community Supervision aided in the investigation.
Trump was shot in the ear during an assassination attempt last summer on the campaign trail in Pennsylvania and was unhurt in a second attempt on his life at his Florida golf course last September.
