Nashville's ICE arrests were bad. The lack of information is worse

Yahoo

13-05-2025

The more I learn about what happened on the south side of my own hometown, starting in darkness early on May 4, the angrier I become.
It's not just that federally driven storm troopers, under the dictates of a broken immigration system, stopped, seized, and 'disappeared' dozens of unnamed, unnumbered people. It's that the lack of information about where they were taken has devastated their families even more.
Unhelpful silence in lieu of public explanation from state and federal authorities has only added gross insult to civil law injuries. Tight-lipped state and federal officials have also adopted this arrogant response to any questions: 'The American people voted for this,' referring to the November election.
No, we did not. Arrest criminals, yes, but we didn't ask for this. We didn't vote for a dragnet that stops and unnerves innocent family members.
Nashville's city officials (chiefly Mayor O'Connell and Metro Law Director Wally Dietz) and a few local news reporters have been doing their best over the past week, asking what exactly happened in the darkness that early Sunday.
As yet, no answers or explanations have come from the authorities who directed this. In particular, the elected officials who have so utterly caved to the extreme Trump regime – Governor Bill Lee, US Senators Blackburn and Hagerty, as well as other Republicans in the Legislature and delegation to Congress – have made themselves shamefully scarce.
In a saner time, a Tennessee Governor would at least offer helpful information, insisting that the feds and his own Highway Patrol identify who was taken away. But no such wise behavior has come forward a week after ICE's Nashville operations began.
Loved ones are left to imagine the worst. Did their family members wake up in another country on the morning of Cinco de Mayo? Who knows?
More: Nashville Mayor Freddie O'Connell: Recent ICE arrests caused 'deep community harm'
In a saner moment, the US senators who stood by and allowed a stumbling new regime to trash the notion of due process would stand on the same sidewalk where loved ones now grieve these disappearances and insist that details be made public immediately.
But those who might know answers aren't telling. And the American officials who could demand the answers aren't.
This situation in Nashville, with macho agents in fearsome SWAT gear and dark sunglasses, is downright alarming and scary. Who will be disappeared from our streets next because their skin is brown?
'Racial profiling,' to be clear, is when a sworn official makes a decision to arrest someone based on his or her race or ethnicity, rather than on specific information about criminal activity. It involves using racial stereotypes to target certain groups based on their appearance, on the color of their skin, and, in this case, driving through a particular part of Nashville.
Here, a dragnet was cast over an entire part of our city—along the Nolensville Pike corridor—where, in daylight, a commercial and cultural district thrives, adding vibrance to our city.
Did this dragnet catch some individuals who are criminals? Maybe. Is that okay? Yes.
Were innocent civilians caught up in the same net. Who knows.
Racial profiling is an insult to our city and all our families. It is harmful and hurtful to civil society.
Loved ones of those taken away were left in fear, to sit and sob on the curb. Eight days later, there is still no word that any of the individuals spirited away were taken before any judge or magistrate and allowed to speak for themselves. The presumption now must be that any 'due process' was utterly ignored.
That ought to be downright chilling for all of us as citizens. The truth is that all those 'others'—whom this administration likes to disparage and marginalize—are, in fact, us.
If you are not alarmed by what happened here, and how our federal and state officials are failing to do their humane duties about it, you aren't paying enough attention.
Keel Hunt, a columnist for the USA Today Network in Tennessee, is the author of four books about Tennessee politics and working on a fifth on the long friendship between Senator Howard Baker and Tennessean publisher John Seigenthaler. Read more at KeelHunt.com.
This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: It's time for leaders to demand answers about ICE arrests | Opinion