Tennessee Said Yes to ICE--and Turned Into a Deportation State

[B.See]

Tennessee Said Yes to ICE—and Turned Into a Deportation State - Mother Jones How the feds worked with state troopers to terrorize Nashville’s immigrants.

By now, the scene [involving the ICE abduction of a 55-year-old Salvadoran man named Edgardo David Campos] has become familiar in communities across the country. The federal siege of Minneapolis—in which masked deportation forces from multiple agencies terrorized immigrants, clashed in the streets with community members, and killed observers Renée Good and Alex Pretti—was the latest in a series of attacks on blue states, including previous high-profile campaigns in Los Angeles and Chicago. Democratic governors like California’s Gavin Newsom and Illinois’ JB Pritzker have lashed out at Donald Trump and his administration, claiming that it is illegally occupying states and violating the Constitution.

But in Tennessee, where Republicans hold a supermajority in both state legislative chambers, many elected officials have welcomed ICE with open arms. GOP Gov. Bill Lee and other state leaders have touted their close working relationship with White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, the architect of Trump’s deportation campaign. As part of this collaboration, they have paired state police with ICE agents, deployed national guard, and green-lighted the federal occupation of Memphis under the “Memphis Safe Task Force,” which, as Mother Jones’ Samantha Michaels reported, residents compared to living in “a war zone, with helicopters circling over neighborhoods, National Guard officers patrolling downtown, and unmarked law enforcement vehicles in the streets.”

As the operation unfolded, Nashville’s Democratic city leaders, who had not been notified in advance, scrambled to understand what was happening. Anguished families searched for missing loved ones, children were left alone at home because their parents never returned, and terrified families went hungry for fear of leaving the house and being targeted. Businesses watched their sales plummet and clients disappear.

[Mother Jones] found that more than 90 percent of the drivers stopped on the first night in Nashville—the heaviest day of arrests during the operation—were either Black, Latino, or Middle Eastern. We also found that state police and ICE mainly targeted South Nashville, the most ethnically diverse area in the city, and made traffic stops based on racial profiling. State leaders and ICE also claimed that the operation was for public safety reasons, but, according to our own analysis, only one-quarter of those arrested had any type of criminal record. Additionally, troopers ignored drivers breaking traffic laws, choosing to help ICE identify people to stop instead. Our analysis also showed that ICE arrested fewer people than it claimed after the operation

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Just another facet of Trump's supremacist war on MINORITY America. (Byron must be proud.)