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Fearing a potential deportation to crisis-riddled Venezuela, Pereira hired an Atlanta area immigration attorney, who took on her husband’s case and successfully petitioned for him to be released on bail.
But to Pereira, the $8,000 bond set by the immigration judge was an expense she didn’t have the funds to cover. By that point, the family had already paid roughly $10,000 in legal fees. To post the bond, which had to be paid in full, Pereira considered selling her car.
“I didn’t have that money at all. I mean, can you imagine? … The only thing I could do was pray; pray a lot for a solution to be found,” she said.
Many other immigrant families have likely found themselves in the Pereiras’ shoes: the median bond amount granted by Georgia immigration courts is $8,000, the highest such figure in the nation. That’s according to analyses of court records through October 2021 by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), a nonpartisan research organization at Syracuse University.
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