If you’re ever booked into a Davidson County, Tenn., jail — no matter how minor the misdemeanor, no matter if your case is later dismissed — the jail’s booking system automatically sends your arrest information to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Under a state law passed in 2024, local law enforcement agencies here are obliged to honor any resulting detention requests for 48 hours beyond normal release time.
A system that delivers the same penalty for committing a violent crime and for driving with a broken taillight is inherently unjust. But this system was at least built to detain only people accused of breaking the law. And that is a very different thing from the wide, seemingly race-based net that ICE has been throwing in Nashville this month. “They have been hunting us,” said Luis Sura, the president of Better Options TN, an immigrant-assistance nonprofit in Franklin.
The hunt started on May 3, when ICE agents joined forces with the Tennessee Highway Patrol and began to pull over drivers in the largely immigrant corridors of South Nashville. In one neighborhood alone, during a single shift, patrol officers made “about five times more stops than the highway patrol makes in all of Davidson County on an average day,” State Senator Jeff Yarbro, a Democrat, said in a statement. “They were basically pulling someone new over every two minutes. That’s not a ‘public safety operation.’”
The historical echoes here are particularly acute to someone like me, a white person born in the Jim Crow South, one who lives in a city the Trail of Tears once ran through.
I was grateful to learn, at least, that Nashville’s Metro Police was not involved in the ICE arrests. “What’s clear today is that people who do not share our values of safety and community have the authority to cause deep community harm,” Nashville’s mayor, Freddie O’Connell, said at a May 5 news conference.
Tennessee is a deeply red state — blood red, fire ant red — but in this blue city, where only 35 percent of voters supported Donald Trump in November, we recognize the contributions of a vast majority of our immigrant neighbors. We understand all too well that the Trump administration, aided by the willing cooperation of red-state officials, is targeting even immigrants who entered the country through legal mechanisms.
As the ICE arrests in Nashville continued over the following week, it became increasingly clear that neither justice nor public safety is what these roundups were primarily designed to deliver.
The sweeps have upended life in this city. But the community has stepped up, to the extent that the law allows, with both information and financial help. The Tennessee Immigrants and Refugee Rights Coalition is posting frequently on social media, explaining the rights that immigrants have under U.S. law and the best way to respond when encountering ICE agents. The American Muslim Advisory Council and Tennessee Justice for Our Neighbors offered a rights workshop for immigrants planning to travel. The Southern Christian Coalition provided bystander training in the best ways to help when witnessing ICE encounters. In partnership with the city, the Community Foundation of Middle Tennessee established the Belonging Fund to support nonprofits that offer emergency assistance to families affected by the sweeps.
In only four months, the terrible travesties of justice and the failures of basic decency being wrought by this administration and by the failure of Congress to check its destruction have become nearly uncountable. But the inhumanity of these immigration sweeps — the brutal glee of rounding up human beings, people who live and work in our midst — is what brings me closest to irrecoverable despair.
Surely any human being can imagine what it’s like to be waiting for a loved one who does not come home. Any one of us can feel the unfairness of being carted away without due process. It would take an act of sheer will to ignore the human beings — so critical to the working of the country, so deeply integrated into our communities — that ICE is sweeping up. They may be undocumented, but they are not invisible.
“The most ubiquitous immigrants are also the least valued,” wrote Renata Soto, the founder and president of Mosaic Changemakers, in a guest column for Nashville Business Journal. These are the people who grow and harvest and process the food we buy, the people who wash dishes in the restaurants where we eat and stock the shelves in the stores where we shop, the people who cut the grass at the buildings where we work and who clean those buildings after we have gone home. They are the hardworking people who built those buildings, too, foundation crew by framing crew by roofing crew by drywall crew by carpentry crew by painting crew.
And yet our president refers to them as inhuman. “No, they’re not humans. They’re not humans. They’re animals,” Mr. Trump said in an interview last year.
We know something about that kind of evil here in the South. White Southerners kept Black human beings enslaved for centuries. We expelled the First Peoples from their lands, most famously on the Trail of Tears. We responded to the civil rights movement with police dogs and fire hoses and billy sticks and guns.
It isn’t necessary to know the history of slavery, the Trail of Tears or white resistance to civil rights to understand the deep injustice of what ICE is doing. That reality may finally be getting to Americans. The far right is working hard to rewrite history, but most of us still know cruelty when we see it. And we cannot let cruelty stand.
Margaret Renkl, a contributing Opinion writer, is the author of the books “The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year,” “Graceland, at Last” and “Late Migrations.”
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected].
Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Bluesky, WhatsApp and Threads.
The post The Profound Inhumanity of ICE Raids appeared first on New York Times.
