Nashville, Tennessee (AP) – More than 100 people were arrested by federal immigration officials during a joint operation with Tennessee Highway Patrol, leaving a lot in the immigrant community of Uncertain and worried Nashville.
“None of us have never seen anything like it,” Lisa Sherman Luna, executive director of the rights of immigrants and refugees from Tennessee said on Friday.
Operation with American immigration and customs application State forces jurisdictions are essential for President Donald Trump Plans for mass deportations. Last week, Florida officials praised A joint operation with ice which resulted in 1,120 immigration arrests.
Tennessee Governor Bill Lee Recently signed a law creating a division of the application of immigration with the Ministry of Security and Internal Security of the State, which includes the road patrol. He is one of the many Republican officials committing to use state resources to carry out Trump's plans.
Meanwhile, officials of the city of the Nashville democratic bastion disowned participation and criticized the arrests. Nashville's law director Wally Dietz said that the state’s federal operation, which started on May 3, caught everyone in the city government by surprise.
Responding to the concerns about the presence of Nashville police outside an ice office, Dietz said on Wednesday that the city “regularly receives requests for additional patrols for various reasons and responds to the measure of resources”. He said he did not know who had been detained and that when he asked for more information from the road patrol, he was told to apply for public files.
The road patrol said on Friday that it had made 588 decrees in the joint operation with Ice, who had taken custody of 103 investigation for immigration violations.
Stops “led to the recovery of illegal drugs and firearms – removing dangerous elements from the street and making Tennessee safer,” said the road patrol. A person was wanted in a murder in Salvador.
The road patrol said that stops are based solely on the driver's behavior. “We do not enter the neighborhoods or arrest vehicles depending on who is someone-we stop according to what he does behind the wheel,” he said.
But supporters of immigrants' rights argue that patrols have focused on certain parts of the city where the majority of residents are people of color.
“All signs indicate that racial profiling intended to terrorize the heart of the community of immigrants and refugees,” said Sherman Luna. “What we heard is that the THP signals people for things like a broken back light or tinted windows.”
Sherman Luna thinks that some of the detained persons would be authorized to stay in the country if they were able to receive a competent legal representation during an immigration hearing. Instead, she heard that people agree to be expelled for fear of being able to spend months or years in detention of immigration.
About 9% of the metropolitan population of Nashville of approximately 2 million immigrants are immigrants, many of whom are from Mexico and Honduras, according to the analysis by the Migration Policy Institute of Census Data. The city also has a large Kurdish population living alongside Sudan, Myanmar and other countries refugees.
“It is a strategy to scare our dynamic, diverse and diverse neighborhoods,” said Sherman Luna.
