In Nashville last week, Tennessee State Highway Patrol troopers conducted around 500 traffic stops in a sweep coordinated with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in order to find undocumented immigrants. The troopers made 12 arrests and detained more than 100 people for “reasons related to immigration.”
How do you conduct 500 traffic stops designed to detain undocumented immigrants? One can only assume the troopers looked for brown people and pulled them over. That’s 500 contrived stops conducted via racial profiling. The operation was performed under the auspices of a law Governor Bill Lee proudly signed during a recent special legislative session.
The new law creates a Centralized Immigration Enforcement division (“CIE,” get it? It’s like ICE, only different) at the state level, to be led by a Chief Immigration Enforcement Officer (CIEO) appointed by the governor. The CIEO (who should be named Old McDonald) will coordinate directly with the Trump Administration on federal immigration policies.
The law also establishes a new driver’s license that distinguishes U.S. citizens from legal permanent residents; makes it a felony for local officials to adopt sanctuary city policies; encourages local governments to participate in enforcing federal immigration policies; and establishes penalties for local officials who do not comply with enforcement mandates.
The ICE and THP operation caused considerable anxiety in Nashville, and residents raised questions about whether local officials knew about it in advance. The short answer is “no.”
“I want to be clear. We did not request this approach to safety. We do not support it,” said Nashville Mayor Freddie O’Connell. “It’s important for us to get this right and it’s very frustrating to see a failure in the process.” O’Connell then issued an executive order aimed at tracking and reporting any future interactions with federal immigration authorities.
If they’ve not done so already, it would be a good idea for Memphis’ elected officials to get ahead of this kind of operation before it happens here. And it will happen here. Republicans have control of the legislative trifecta in Tennessee and they love nothing better than sticking it to the two blue voting areas in the state.
It’s been nearly a month now since the Supreme Court ordered the Trump administration to return Kilmar Abrego Garcia — who was deported to El Salvador’s CECOT mega-prison with no due process — to the United States. If he is ever returned, he would presumably be given a chance to argue his case in court. But the administration has thus far managed to just ignore the Supreme Court, a clear violation of the Constitution.
Here’s the thing: We tend to focus on the individual cases that make the news, like Garcia’s and that of Rumeysa Ozturk, the Tufts University doctoral student and Turkish national who was seized on the street by ICE agents in March and sent to a detention facility (read, prison) in Louisiana. She was released from custody last week, upon the order of a federal judge, but the horrifying fact remains that she was abducted on a street in Boston and spent six weeks in prison with no due process for the “crime” of writing an editorial the Trump administration didn’t like.
But what about the “more than 100 people” who were detained in Nashville? Who are they? Where are they? Who’s going to track their cases? And what about the thousands more who are being picked up and held in for-profit detention centers around the country? What about those who fall through the cracks, like the two-year-old girl born in the U.S. and detained in foster care here after her mother and father were deported?
There is no way the media can keep up with everyone who’s being picked up or report on what happens to them. And that’s part of the administration’s plan: overwhelm the system with mass detentions. It’s why Trump aide Stephen Miller is now calling for the suspension of Habeas Corpus, which constitutionally shields people from unlawful imprisonment and ensures them a day in court.
Joint operations like the one in Nashville are happening all over the country now, and Memphis is unlikely to be left out. What are we going to do when it happens to the people who work and live in our city, our friends and neighbors? Who will tell their stories?
