Tennessee’s recent roundup operations in Nashville’s immigrant communities mark the state’s shameful turn away from core American values like human rights and constitutional protections.
Throughout the first two weeks of May, the Tennessee Highway Patrol (THP) collaborated with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in hundreds of traffic stops in Nashville’s immigrant communities, apparently racially and ethnically targeting drivers.
“By all appearances, government officials racially and ethnically profiled residents, requested driver’s licenses, inquired about tattoos, left cars abandoned on roadways creating traffic hazards, and tore at least one mother from her children,” read a letter signed by all but three of the Davidson County legislative delegation to the heads of Tennessee’s Department of Homeland Security and the Highway Patrol.
The law enforcement operations have led to around 588 traffic stops and 103 people being detained. Despite information requests from Mayor Freddie O’Connell and Davidson County’s lawmakers, state and federal officials have not been forthcoming on who has been detained, where the detainees are, whether they’ve been officially arrested or charged with a crime, and what will happen to them next.
These developments have been concerning to many because, before the Trump era, state and local authorities rarely enforced immigration law.
Tennessee’s Republican lawmakers put out statements supporting the raids. They are also the ones to thank for making these raids possible, because last year the Republican supermajority passed legislation making it easier for state law enforcement to work hand-in-hand with federal immigration authorities. It’s also worth mentioning that, just in April of this year, the Tennessee General Assembly passed a bill that eliminated the Tennessee Human Rights Commission (THRC), which had safeguarded civil rights in the state since 1963.
Racially targeted dragnets violate human rights
One does not have to be an immigration rights advocate to be concerned about what’s happening in our communities. Detaining Tennessee residents for their skin color or for the neighborhood they live in violates their rights as enshrined in both the United Nation’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and the U.S. Constitution.
The UDHR has 30 articles, but a few stand out today:
– Article 3: “Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person.”
– Article 9: “No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile.”
– Article 10: “Everyone is entitled in full equality to a fair and public hearing by an independent and impartial tribunal, in the determination of his rights and obligations and of any criminal charge against him.”
– Article 14: “Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution.”
These articles defend all humans from arbitrary arrest, detention, and exile while granting them the right to asylum and due process. Hispanic communities in Nashville are the descendants of families who left Latin America, often fleeing U.S. military intervention, CIA-backed covert operations and disastrous U.S.-led financial sanctions on their nations of origin. For these communities to be targeted again, this time on U.S. soil, is the height of cruelty.
The U.S. Constitution provides equal protection for all
The Constitution is even more explicit in the protections it offers to all persons residing in the U.S. Racial and ethnic profiling violate the Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause in the Fourteenth Amendment, which prohibits discrimination based on race.
THP claimed their operations with ICE were justified because they were “…public safety operation[s] that targeted areas of suspected gang activity with a history of serious traffic crashes.” But even if that were true, the Equal Protection Clause prohibits racial discrimination even in communities with high crime rates.
Quoting D.C.-based legislative attorney April J. Anderson, “The Equal Protection Clause’s prohibition on intentional racial discrimination remains true even if members of a given race are responsible for more crimes in a particular neighborhood or commit more crimes of a certain type. Even if the evidence showed that police relied on racial profiling out of a perhaps ill-conceived notion that it helped fight crime, the Equal Protection Clause prohibits intentionally relying on race in policing, no matter the underlying rationale for the policy.”
The Fourth Amendment protects against unreasonable search and seizure and requires individual justification for law enforcement actions. The word ‘individual’ is the key word there, as dragnets, roundups, and other group-focused law enforcement operations have often been successfully challenged as Fourth Amendment violations. Again quoting Anderson, “It [the Fourth Amendment] does not specifically prohibit racial profiling, but courts would not consider stops and searches based solely on a subject’s race to be reasonable seizures because police have identified no individualized reason for suspicion.”
Tennessee is at a turning point
Racial profiling and ethnically motivated law enforcement actions have a long, gruesome history in the U.S.. Yet from the “Show me your papers” scandal in Maricopa County, Arizona to the Stop and Frisk policy in New York City, landmark court decisions were made, justice prevailed, and the protections offered by the Constitution were again held aloft as the supreme law of the land.
Tennessee is at a turning point. Will it ally itself with a presidential administration that, as recently as May 9, floated suspending habeas corpus? Recent events suggest Tennessee officials want to play ball with the Trump Administration. Tennesseans need to remind elected officials they work for us, not the feds, because if constitutional protections don’t apply to the most vulnerable of us, then they don’t apply to any of us.
