Mayor Freddie O’Connell of Nashville would rather be talking about the state of the sidewalks. New traffic signals. Even the increase in the property tax rate. Instead, he has been busy addressing the fallout from a round of federal immigration raids last month in his liberal-leaning city.
First, angry residents accused city officials of helping federal agents detain more than 100 people during the raids, which Mr. O’Connell, a first-term Democrat, quickly denied. After the outcry, he ordered city departments to let his office know about any outreach from immigration agents; he also expressed support for a community fund that seeks private donations for immigrant families.
Tennessee Republicans then demanded investigations into whether the mayor had violated state law. The state has banned local governments from adopting “sanctuary city” policies, which it describes as limiting cooperation with immigration enforcement and giving undocumented immigrants “the right to lawful presence.”
Mr. O’Connell drew more Republican wrath when his office published the names of some immigration agents who had contacted the city. He has maintained that the names were published accidentally because they were in public records, including summaries of emergency calls.
The city has since removed the names and denies violating state law. Nonetheless, two congressional committees are investigating the effect of Nashville’s policies on federal immigration enforcement.
The backlash demonstrates how Mr. O’Connell, 48, is caught between the laws of his deeply Republican state and the progressive leanings of many of his constituents. It is perhaps the biggest test yet of his cautious pragmatism, at a moment when local leaders are on the front lines of the Trump administration’s aggressive overhaul of federal policy.
It also underscores the different political and policy calculations that Democrats have to make in deep red states, where they’re often clashing with Republican state and federal representatives.
“All of this comes down to, can we govern the city as effectively as possible?” Mr. O’Connell said in an interview last week, in between turning over internal city documents to the congressional committees and signing a new budget. Rather than joining the chorus of Democratic outrage about Trump administration policies, he added, “I am far more interested in the outcomes of the work we do than a series of rhetorical check boxes.”
Mr. O’Connell, the city’s fifth mayor in 10 years, has remained popular since taking office in September 2023.
A Vanderbilt University poll in April found that he had a 67 percent approval rating. And it found that a majority of residents felt positive about the city’s direction, unlike what the same poll found in 2022 and 2023. Last year, voters approved a $3.1 billion plan for infrastructure improvements, a victory for the mayor.
But as the Trump administration has pushed constitutional boundaries and the State Legislature has taken aim at the city, some in Nashville have wondered whether the mayor should take a more aggressive stance. In a shift from last year, the Vanderbilt poll found that a narrow majority of residents now wanted their elected officials to more frequently challenge state leaders.
“I don’t see him as the type of person who goes out looking for a fight or picking a fight,” said Delishia Porterfield, a councilwoman who works closely with Mr. O’Connell, “but I do believe he’ll do everything he can legally to keep our residents safe.”
But Mr. O’Connell, far more a policy wonk than a progressive firebrand, has intentionally avoided becoming a resistance figure in office. He has focused his criticism of the raids on the refusal of immigration officials to disclose whom they detained and why.
In the interview, he expressed some exasperation that “a tempest in a teapot” over his recent order requiring city departments to share knowledge about federal immigration outreach was grabbing local attention, rather than the budget he just signed or the impact of proposed federal cuts on Nashville, a diverse city of just over 700,000.
“I hope people don’t lose the thread of what really matters here,” he said.
Born and raised in Nashville, Mr. O’Connell first ran for office in 2002, as an independent seeking a seat in the State House. He lost, but later ran successfully for the Metropolitan Nashville Council.
Even before seeking office, Mr. O’Connell — who occasionally breaks out of wonk mode to D.J. — was known for his devotion to improving the city’s roads and public transportation system.
“He takes his time,” said Gail Carr Williams, who served with Mr. O’Connell on the city’s transit authority. “You can tell that that’s part of how he learns and how he takes what he learns to make his decisions.”
When he began running for mayor, Mr. O’Connell was initially short on money in a crowded, bipartisan field of candidates hoping to replace John Cooper, a centrist Democrat who had decided not to seek re-election. But Mr. O’Connell pointed to his opposition to building a new N.F.L. stadium as evidence that he would prioritize residents over tourists, and he gained popularity.
Over the course of his campaign, Mr. O’Connell smoothed over his relationship with a local bar and honky-tonk mogul who had paid for attack ads against him — a preview of how he would approach tensions with state leaders. Even in the current atmosphere, some powerful Republicans speak well of him.
“We can disagree on things and still be able to work together,” said Cameron Sexton, the Tennessee House speaker, who has found Mr. O’Connell more accessible than his predecessors. Yet Mr. Sexton emphasized that “we have oversight of local government,” and that Nashville’s leaders “do not have absolute free rein.”
It is nothing new for a Nashville mayor to weather Republican attacks, but Mr. O’Connell is in a lonelier spot than some of his predecessors were: Redistricting in 2022 sliced up the congressional district that had represented all of Nashville since Tennessee became a state, and that Democrats had held for almost 150 years.
Nashville is now divided among the Fifth Congressional District, represented by Andy Ogles, a Republican, and two other districts. But none of its three House members live in the city or have offices there.
“The public policy landscape of Tennessee is simply more constrained for anyone governing here and that is simply a reality,” Mr. O’Connell said. He added that he envied “previous mayors of Nashville, who had a congressional delegation where a member of Congress actually resided in the city.”
Mr. Ogles is a leading member of the deeply conservative House Freedom Caucus. He has leveled the loudest attacks against Mr. O’Connell, accusing him of intimidating immigration officials with his recent executive order and enabling criminal behavior by not supporting President Trump’s immigration crackdown.
The mayor’s “embrace of sanctuary lawlessness in Tennessee may very well be criminal,” Mr. Ogles said in a statement, calling Mr. O’Connell “a rogue mayor.” The documents that the mayor’s office turned over to Congress last week, Mr. Ogles added, “open multiple avenues of inquiry and raise serious questions the mayor must answer.” He did not provide details.
Mr. O’Connell has been restrained in his response to Mr. Ogles’s criticism. He called it “frustrating” that Mr. Ogles’s investigation of him had drawn more media attention than Mr. Ogles’s “role in a devastating federal tax and budget process.”
The mayor has also felt some heat from left-leaning constituents who say he could be doing more to openly support Nashville’s immigrant population. But now that Mr. Ogles is investigating Mr. O’Connell, some critics declined to publicly air their frustrations with the mayor, saying that they did not wish to undermine him or invite broader criticism.
Lawmakers and activists alike are quick to acknowledge the constraints that Mr. O’Connell faces.
“The level of state overreach is so deep that our local elected officials don’t have many tools at their disposal,” said Lisa Sherman Luna, the executive director of the Tennessee Immigrants & Refugee Rights Coalition. She added that it was “totally reasonable and rational that a local mayor would want to know information about whether the federal government is conducting action in his city.”
Mr. O’Connell says he hopes to be judged by what he does to improve life in Nashville, rather than how he navigates contentious national issues.
“I would hope that at the end of all of this, our overall success is based on the outcomes of the work we did,” he said.
Emily Cochrane is a national reporter for The Times covering the American South, based in Nashville.
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