ATLANTA (AP) — After leading Atlanta out of the COVID-19 pandemic and a coinciding crime spike, Mayor Andre Dickens believes he deserves a second term as the city soon hosts its most high-profile event since the 1996 Olympics.
Dickens recently launched his reelection campaign with $1.4 million in the bank and support from Atlanta’s business and political elite, including civil rights hero and former mayor Andrew Young and Jason Carter, Jimmy Carter’s grandson.
Atlanta’s next mayor will preside as visitors flood the city for eight matches of the 2026 World Cup. No prominent challengers have emerged for the fall election. If that holds through candidate qualifying in August, Dickens’ second mayoral bid could forgo the drama of 2021, when the then-city councilman won a surprise victory over two better-known rivals.
Dickens says he’s fulfilling promises to lower crime and boost affordable housing. And he shrugs off criticism from activists who say he’s alienated the city’s progressives — most notably for his support of a $115 million police and firefighter training center derided by opponents as “Cop City.”
“The city got stabilized during my term, unified during my term, and is on a path that everybody can want to come here to raise a family,” Dickens told The Associated Press in an interview.
Emory University law professor Fred Smith Jr. said Dickens has been an “energizing force,” adding he ramped up affordable housing construction and helped thwart efforts for Atlanta’s wealthiest neighborhood to break away from the city.
“In terms of where he has done less well, I think a lot of folks who pay close attention to Atlanta government don’t feel heard, especially on issues related to transit and the public training center,” Smith said.
Atlanta is one of 16 cities in the U.S., Canada and Mexico hosting the 2026 FIFA World Cup, with a preview this summer when it hosts six matches of the FIFA Club World Cup, another international soccer tournament.
The games will bring more traffic to the increasingly packed city. Like past mayors, Dickens has been slow to expand public transportation. He backed away from plans to build a light rail line along the city’s Eastside Beltline trail, saying shifting to other projects will help higher-need areas. Those are expected to take years to complete.
Regardless, Dickens insisted Atlanta will have a “very festive time” during the World Cup with repaved roads and upgraded lighting.
“I want people to leave knowing our culture, having supported our small businesses, having experienced Atlanta so that they might want to come back as a vacation or bring their business here, open an office here,” Dickens said.
Dickens promised to build or preserve 20,000 affordable housing units over two terms.
Over half have been built or are under construction. Most are rentals and around three-quarters are for people making 60% or less of the midpoint household income, which was $85,880, according to 2023 U.S. Census Bureau figures. Some are on government-owned land or part of neighborhood redevelopments with mixed-income housing.
Even as it builds, Atlanta is quickly losing affordable units as wealthier people move in and push poorer, longtime residents out, a pattern that was accelerated after the Olympics. Dickens acknowledges this obstacle.
Despite investing millions to reduce homelessness and quickly house people, Dickens’ administration was criticized in January when a man died after being crushed in his tent by a bulldozer clearing a homeless camp ahead of Martin Luther King Jr. holiday events.
Dickens called for rethinking how the city clears encampments, but said they are unsafe for people living there and nearby residents.
Another top priority for Dickens was reducing crime, which spiked in Atlanta and other U.S. cities during the pandemic and later fell. From 2023 to 2024, overall violent crime in Atlanta fell by 46%, and youth crime dropped by 23%, law enforcement officials said at a recent press conference with Dickens.
Atlanta Police Chief Darin Schierbaum credited Dickens with raising officers' pay and letting them take home patrol cars, saying the moves retained more officers and halved 911 response times. Dickens also launched sports and job programs for thousands of young people to take a “holistic” approach to crime.
Then there's “Cop City.”
Dickens has supported the training center since he was a council member, saying Atlanta would benefit from better-trained police. It opened fully on Tuesday.
The project became a flashpoint for progressive activists who argued it would further militarize police and damage the environment of an adjacent Black neighborhood. Tensions rose when a protester was killed by police who argued they had shot at them.
Efforts to “diminish and vilify” the training center's critics have created a “deep, deep, deep mistrust between people who could have been this mayor’s greatest allies” and Dickens' office, said Rohit Malhotra, founder of the Center for Civic Innovation, a progressive group that sought a voter referendum to reject the construction.
Last May, a burst pipe deprived many Atlantans of water for days, and Dickens was slammed for poor communication. He now says plans are underway to fix the city’s aging water and sewer system.
The city's inspector general resigned in February following a long-running feud with Dickens. She accused him of trying to thwart her oversight of City Hall. He said her methods broke the law.
Dickens said he hopes to mend relationships with his critics.
“The unifier in me is going to use the power of being a second-term mayor to bring everybody into the group project,” Dickens said.
Kramon is a corps member for The Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues. Follow Kramon on X: @charlottekramon.
Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens poses for a photo, Friday, Feb. 21, 2025, in Atlanta. (AP Photo/Mike Stewart)
Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens poses for a photo, Friday, Feb. 21, 2025, in Atlanta. (AP Photo/Mike Stewart)
Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens poses for a photo, Friday, Feb. 21, 2025, in Atlanta. (AP Photo/Mike Stewart)
ATLANTA (AP) — A pregnant woman in Georgia who was declared brain dead after a medical emergency has been on life support for three months to let the fetus grow enough to be delivered, a move her family says a hospital told them was required under the state's strict anti-abortion law.
With her due date still more than three months away, it could be one of the longest such pregnancies. Her family is upset that Georgia’s law that restricts abortion once cardiac activity is detected doesn’t allow relatives to have a say in whether a pregnant woman is kept on life support.
Georgia’s so-called “heartbeat law” is among the restrictive abortion statutes that have been put in place in many conservative states since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade three years ago.
Adriana Smith, a 30-year-old mother and nurse, was declared brain-dead — meaning she is legally dead — in February, her mother, April Newkirk, told Atlanta TV station WXIA.
Newkirk said her daughter had intense headaches more than three months ago and went to Atlanta's Northside Hospital, where she received medication and was released. The next morning, her boyfriend woke to her gasping for air and called 911. Emory University Hospital determined she had blood clots in her brain and she was declared brain-dead.
Newkirk said Smith is now 21 weeks pregnant. Removing breathing tubes and other life-saving devices would likely kill the fetus.
Northside did not respond to a request for comment Thursday. Emory Healthcare said it could not comment on an individual case because of privacy rules, but released a statement saying it “uses consensus from clinical experts, medical literature, and legal guidance to support our providers as they make individualized treatment recommendations in compliance with Georgia’s abortion laws and all other applicable laws. Our top priorities continue to be the safety and wellbeing of the patients we serve.”
Smith's family says Emory doctors have told them they are not allowed to stop or remove the devices that are keeping her breathing because state law bans abortion after cardiac activity can be detected — generally around six weeks into pregnancy.
The law was adopted in 2019 but not enforced until after Roe v. Wade was overturned in the 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization ruling, opening the door to state abortion bans. Twelve states are enforcing bans on abortion at all stages of pregnancy and three others have bans like Georgia's that kick in after about six weeks.
Like the others, Georgia's ban includes an exception if an abortion is necessary to maintain the woman's life. Those exceptions have been at the heart of legal and political questions, including a major Texas Supreme Court ruling last year that found the ban there applies even when there are major pregnancy complications.
Smith's family, including her five-year-old son, still visit her in the hospital.
Newkirk told WXIA that doctors told the family that the fetus has fluid on the brain and that they're concerned about his health.
“She’s pregnant with my grandson. But he may be blind, may not be able to walk, may not survive once he’s born,” Newkirk said. She has not said whether the family wants Smith removed from life support.
Monica Simpson, executive director of SisterSong, the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit challenging Georgia’s abortion law, said the situation is problematic.
"Her family deserved the right to have decision-making power about her medical decisions,” Simpson said in a statement. “Instead, they have endured over 90 days of retraumatization, expensive medical costs, and the cruelty of being unable to resolve and move toward healing.”
Thaddeus Pope, a bioethicist and lawyer at Mitchell Hamline School of Law in St. Paul, Minnesota, said while a few states have laws that specifically limit removing treatment from a pregnant woman who is alive but incapacitated, or brain dead, Georgia isn't one of them.
“Removing the woman's mechanical ventilation or other support would not constitute an abortion,” he said. “Continued treatment is not legally required.”
Lois Shepherd, a bioethicist and law professor at the University of Virginia, also said she does not believe life support is legally required in this case.
But she said whether a state could insist Smith remains on life support is uncertain since the overturning of Roe, which found that fetuses do not have the rights of people.
“Pre-Dobbs, a fetus didn’t have any rights,” Shepherd said. “And the state’s interest in fetal life could not be so strong as to overcome other important rights, but now we don’t know.”
The situation echoes a case in Texas more than a decade ago when a brain-dead woman was kept on life support for about two months because she was pregnant. A judge eventually ruled that the hospital was misapplying state law, and life support was removed.
Brain death in pregnancy is rare. Even rarer still are cases in which doctors aim to prolong the pregnancy after a woman is declared brain-dead.
“It’s a very complex situation, obviously, not only ethically but also medically,” said Dr. Vincenzo Berghella, director of maternal fetal medicine at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia.
A 2021 review that Berghella co-authored scoured medical literature going back decades for cases in which doctors declared a woman brain-dead and aimed to prolong her pregnancy. It found 35.
Of those, 27 resulted in a live birth, the majority either immediately declared healthy or with normal follow-up tests. But Berghella also cautioned that the Georgia case was much more difficult because the pregnancy was less far along when the woman was declared brain dead. In the 35 cases he studied, doctors were able to prolong the pregnancy by an average of just seven weeks before complications forced them to intervene.
“It’ s just hard to keep the mother out of infection, out of cardiac failure,” he said.
Berghella also found a case from Germany that resulted in a live birth when the woman was declared brain dead at nine weeks of pregnancy — about as far along as Smith was when she died.
Georgia's law confers personhood on a fetus. Those who favor personhood say fertilized eggs, embryos and fetuses should be considered people with the same rights as those already born.
Georgia state Sen. Ed Setzler, a Republican who sponsored the 2019 law, said he supported Emory’s interpretation.
“I think it is completely appropriate that the hospital do what they can to save the life of the child,” Setzler said. “I think this is an unusual circumstance, but I think it highlights the value of innocent human life. I think the hospital is acting appropriately.”
Setzler said he believes it is sometimes acceptable to remove life support from someone who is brain dead, but that the law is “an appropriate check” because the mother is pregnant. He said Smith's relatives have “good choices,” including keeping the child or offering it for adoption.
Georgia’s abortion ban has been in the spotlight before.
Last year, ProPublica reported that two Georgia women died after they did not get proper medical treatment for complications from taking abortion pills. The stories of Amber Thurman and Candi Miller entered into the presidential race, with Democrat Kamala Harris saying the deaths were the result of the abortion bans that went into effect in Georgia and elsewhere after Dobbs.
Mulvihill reported from Cherry Hill, New Jersey. Associated Press journalists Lisa Baumann, Kate Brumback, Sudhin Thanawala, Sharon Johnson and Charlotte Kramon contributed.
Emory University Hospital Midtown is seen on Thursday, May 15, 2025, in Atlanta. (AP Photo/Brynn Anderson)
Emory University Hospital Midtown is seen on Thursday, May 15, 2025, in Atlanta. (AP Photo/Brynn Anderson)
Emory University Hospital Midtown is seen on Thursday, May 15, 2025, in Atlanta. (AP Photo/Brynn Anderson)
Emory University Hospital Midtown is seen on Thursday, May 15, 2025, in Atlanta. (AP Photo/Brynn Anderson)
FILE - The Georgia State Capitol is seen from Liberty Plaza in downtown Atlanta, April 6, 2020. (Alyssa Pointer/Atlanta Journal-Constitution via AP, File)
