President Donald Trump praised the Memphis Safe Task Force as part of his State of the Union speech Tuesday night, calling the joint-agency operation a “big success.”
Republican Gov. Bill Lee has called for more state troopers as part of the operation, devoting 100 patrolmen to the city. As the legislature considers Lee’s budget, and the expansion of state troopers, officials with the Tennessee Highway Patrol are facing questions of racial profiling and dehumanizing treatment of Nashville’s immigrant community during a dragnet immigration operation last May.
Newly released body camera footage from the operation shows that pairs of Tennessee state troopers and Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents competed to see who could make the most arrests, often marking the people they detained with a number to show which team had made the arrest.
“We got to give them the mark of the beast,” one trooper said during an arrest, clarifying it was for “Team 6.”
Troopers can then be seen in the footage writing on the arm of a woman in handcuffs.
Sen. Heidi Campbell, D-Nashville, questioned the Tennessee Highway Patrol about the body camera footage during a budget hearing Wednesday.
“Can you confirm whether this competition was formally sanctioned by THP leadership, informally encouraged, or whether leadership was unaware it was happening? And if leadership was not aware, what does that tell us about supervision and accountability structures within these joint operations?” Campbell asked.
Col. Matt Perry said he was limited in what he could say because of ongoing litigation but that state troopers only pull people over for traffic violations.
“Troopers saying things and our cameras picking up ICE agents saying inappropriate things, we will handle that and address that. We expect higher of our people,” Perry said. “But we were making probable-cause traffic stops.”
During the dragnet operation, troopers stopped a white driver who was going 64 mph in a 40 mph zone but let him go without a citation. Meanwhile, ICE agents encouraged a man they arrested to call his friends to pick up his car so officers could also detain them when they arrived, according to the Nashville Banner.
The Tennessee Highway Patrol is asking for a nearly $44 million increase in budget to attract and retain talent. A majority of that money, more than $19 million, would go towards giving troopers salary parity with other local law enforcement agencies.
The budget proposal advanced unanimously in the statehouse Wednesday morning.
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