This spring, Georgians could not turn on a television without seeing the same commercial. Rick Jackson, the billionaire running for governor, looks straight into the camera and promises that immigrants who break the law on his watch will be "deported or departed." The ad ran nearly 9,000 times on Georgia stations.

At the exact same time, a company Jackson owns was fighting a lawsuit from immigrant nurses who said it had trapped them in contracts they could not get out of — and threatened to call immigration authorities on them when they tried.

On June 22, 2026 — days after Jackson became the Republican nominee for governor — that company agreed to pay $3 million to settle. CNN reported the story on August 20. Until now it had gotten almost no attention in the governor's race.

What the nurses said happened

The company is Avant Healthcare Professionals. Its business is recruiting nurses from other countries and placing them in American hospitals. Jackson Healthcare — the conglomerate Jackson founded in 2000 — bought Avant in 2018. Business records filed in Florida list Rick Jackson as Avant's manager.

Two nurses sued in 2023. Latoya Lewis came from Jamaica in 2021. Lucinda Byron came from St. Vincent and the Grenadines and started at a South Dakota hospital in 2022. Both signed multi-year contracts with Avant.

According to their complaint, what they found was this:

• They were paid less than nurses the hospitals hired directly.
• They could take almost no time off, and had little chance to move up.
• They struggled to pay their bills on what Avant paid them.
• When they tried to leave, Avant told them they owed money to cover the cost of bringing them here. Avant wanted $41,832 from Byron, due in 30 days.
• Staff allegedly threatened to contact Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and led them to believe that quitting could put their immigration status at risk.

That last part is the one to sit with. These nurses came in on EB-3 visas, which come with a green card. A green card does not generally require you to stay with the company that brought you here. The threat, their lawyers argued, was leverage — not law.

Here is how the nurses themselves put it in their complaint:

"Avant's 'employment' is essentially indentured servitude."

Their lawyers argued the contracts violated the Trafficking Victims Protection Act and federal wage law. Avant asked a federal judge to throw the trafficking claims out. The judge refused. The case moved to state court in Florida and grew into a class action.

The settlement: 5,219 workers, about $500 each

By November, both sides had identified 5,219 current and former Avant workers who qualified. A judge approved the deal in July 2026.

The payout is $3 million spread across all of them. A spokeswoman for Jackson Healthcare noted that of the workers getting money, "most will receive approximately $500 or less." Others get fees waived and nothing more.

Avant denied doing anything wrong, and the court never ruled that its practices were illegal. The company says it settled "to avoid the cost and distraction of continued litigation."

That is a normal thing for a company to say. It is a stranger thing for a company owned by a man running for governor on the promise that he will be the toughest person in Georgia on immigration.

This is not the first time

Avant's hiring practices drew federal scrutiny five years before Jackson bought it.

In February 2013, the U.S. Justice Department settled with Avant over hundreds of internet job postings that federal investigators said showed an illegal preference for foreign-trained workers over American ones. Avant paid a $27,750 penalty and agreed to change its policies.

So the record on this company reads: penalized by the federal government for favoring foreign workers over Americans, then sued by those same foreign workers for how it treated them once they got here.

Avant is not alone in the second part. Bloomberg Law counted at least 10 class actions by nurses over these contracts in 2024. And in 2025, New York Attorney General Letitia James recovered more than $660,000 for 71 foreign-recruited nurses from a different staffing agency that charged them up to $20,000 to quit. Her office called it labor trafficking. Lawyers call these deals "stay-or-pay" contracts. California and New York have banned them.

Georgia has not.

Two Rick Jacksons

The gap between the campaign and the company is not subtle.

In the ad that made him famous, Jackson says: "I don't care if you're a Muslim or a Mongolian. You don't have the right to force your culture on our country."

In Avant's own guide for the foreign workers it recruits, the company tells them: "You don't have to choose between the culture you came from and the one you're adapting to. Finding harmony between the two creates a well-rounded, multicultural identity."

It goes further than tone. Jackson is campaigning to help President Trump tighten the immigration system. Avant has been fighting that same administration over it. In 2020 the company sued the Trump administration over visa delays for nurses it was trying to bring in from the Philippines. Earlier this year, Avant's senior vice president of global operations, Lesley Hamilton, said in a March video that a new $100,000 fee on H-1B visas would cost the company more than she could calculate on the spot:

"That is a lot of money if we were to bring in the volume of nurses this year under the H1B that we brought in last year."

CNN asked Jackson's campaign how he plans to partner with Trump on immigration when his own company is in a fight with the administration over visa policy. The campaign did not respond.

CNN also asked whether Jackson supports more visas for foreign workers. No answer there either.

His spokesman, Garrison Douglas, said Jackson's focus is on "criminal illegal immigration and following the law," and that Avant's nurses "come to America legally, waiting several years, learn English, pay taxes and save lives."

Both things can be true. That is exactly the point: Jackson wants credit for a company that depends on legal immigration while running ads that treat immigration itself as the threat.

Who actually gets hurt

There are two sets of losers here, and they are not who the ads say they are.

The first is the nurses. People who sold everything to come here, took a job that paid less than the person working beside them, and were told leaving would cost them $41,832 and maybe their status.

The second is American nurses. Rachel Dempsey, a lawyer for the plaintiffs and associate director of the worker-rights firm Towards Justice, told CNN that hospitals like recruiting through staffing companies because those workers are typically paid less — which means American-trained nurses are competing against cheaper labor.

"It brings down wages for everybody," Dempsey said.

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates there will be about 190,000 openings for registered nurses every year over the next decade. Somebody is going to fill them. The question is whether they get paid fairly — and Jackson's company has spent years on the wrong side of that question while he ran ads about the border.

The pattern

This is the third time in a month Rick Jackson has said one thing on the campaign trail while his businesses did another.

He said he would never do business with the state of Georgia — 21 days after one of his companies renewed a state contract.

He says being a billionaire makes him incorruptible — while spending close to $200 million of his own money to win the office, with ordinary Georgians contributing about $280,000 combined.

And now: he promises immigrants will be "deported or departed," while a company he owns was accused of using the threat of ICE to keep immigrant nurses from quitting.

Jackson is not the only Republican running on a hard line while depending on the workers he campaigns against. Texas Governor Greg Abbott wants "exactly zero" foreign-visa teachers in a state that employs more of them than any other. The rhetoric is for us. The workforce is for them.

Georgians vote on this in November. It is worth knowing which Rick Jackson would be governor.

Source

Georgia GOP candidate Rick Jackson faces an immigration scandal at his company — CNN, August 20, 2026. Photo: Elijah Nouvelage/Getty Images.