The ICE-THP Dragnet

Much collateral damage

This morning all the citizens of Nashville are waking up to more news about the scale and scope of the ICE/Tennessee Highway Patrol dragnet that has been removing people from their families in our community.

First, see this news story in The New York Times with new details of how the dragnet works. This is definitely NOT the way Nashville’s boosters like to see the Music City portrayed in the pages of the national press.

“Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents … spotted alongside state highway patrol officers along the southern roads where much of the city’s Latino population lives,” the story begins.

Next, read this guest column in the Nashville Business Journal by the civic leader Renata Soto. She lifts up our awareness, especially of how the ICE/THP dragnet is disrupting the lives of children in families where a parent or other has been arrested and ‘disappeared’ abruptly, all without providing any helpful information to the others in the family left behind - where the loved one has been taken, under what conditions, even where vital prescription medications can be forwarded.

“How do you measure the impact of mass fear? Latino children are losing sleep, suffering panic attacks, skipping medical care and stepping into adult roles because their parents are too afraid to drive. Many live in constant fear, wondering if their parents will be there when they get home from school. “Will we be next?” they ask. Families are unraveling under the weight of sudden disappearances and financial collapse after breadwinners vanish.“

More of us need to be speaking out about this, using any forum we can to shine some light into this complicated administrative darkness. This is not OK.

Mayor Freddie O’Connell and Metro Law Director Wally Dietz are, in my view, doing their best to call attention to this disruption of families in our city.

You might also expect that Governor Bill Lee, who is in charge of the Tennessee Highway Patrol, to have spoken up by now insisting on the release of humane details that these families are entitled to have. But no, he has not.

Nor have the other political “leaders” in our state and federal governments are silent. They are calling for no helpful information to these devastated families in their dark hour. From our US Senators to Nashville’s multiple Republican congressmen and state legislators, they all have fallen in line and clammed up altogether - fearful of what punishment the vengeful Trump administration might also do to them.

In this yawning void of official silence, the families of detainees are bereft, forlorn, and their children deeply at risk.

This, on many levels, is not OK.

© 2025 Keel Hunt