Chester Brown likely won't be playing football at the University of Georgia, nor will he even be a student. A policy adopted by the Georgia Board of Regents prevents undocumented and illegal immigrants from attending state universities. Brown is the son of Samoan immigrants and played high school football in Hinesville, Georgia, but a report by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution indicates the Brown family might have been unable to produce documentation that Brown is an American citizen.
According to the AJC, the root of the policy preventing Brown's admission to UGA stems from a 2010 case in which a Kennesaw State student was arrested for a minor traffic violation that revealed she was attending KSU as an in-state student despite being an undocumented resident of the state of Georgia. That prompted a committee led investigation, which birthed the policy presumably blocking Brown's admission to UGA:
[The committees] found that there were approximately 521 undocumented students among the 311,000 students in the university system. Within that was "a smaller subset" of illegal immigrants.
That led to the formation of a Regents policy that states:
"A person who is not lawfully present in the United States shall not be eligible for admission to any University System institution which, for the two most recent academic years, did not admit all academically qualified applicants (except for cases in which applicants were rejected for non-academic reasons)."
Because of privacy laws, officials at Brown's school cannot officially comment on Brown's status as a U.S. citizen, but according to the AJC, the principle of Hinesville Institute acknowledged that the situation was "an immigration issue" and that an immigration lawyer was being sought to assist in helping Brown enroll.
For more on the University of Georgia, go to Dawg Sports. For more college football news and updates, go to SB Nation's college football page.