A chorus of incredulous laughter filled the gallery as Councilmember At-Large Burkley Allen spoke in favor of license plate readers during the final night of debate over council bill BL2021-961. The controversial legislation creates a framework for Metro agencies to use LPRs.
“I appreciate the very important and legitimate concerns about people being taken from their homes,” said Allen at the Feb. 1 Metro Council meeting, “and I think we’ve worked hard to take precautions so that that is very, very, very, very, very unlikely to happen.” She was responding to a common refrain from opponents of LPRs, who have expressed concerns about the surveillance technology being used to assist ICE with immigration enforcement.
The bill — which faced opposition from a host of advocacy organizations — narrowly passed, setting the stage for the Metro Nashville Police Department to implement a countywide LPR program. District 30 Councilmember Sandra Sepulveda, the first Latina elected to the Metro Council and a major opponent of the bill, remembers that night vividly. “Votes drastically changed in the last couple of minutes,” she tells the Scene. A letter from MNPD Chief John Drake and Nashville Department of Transportation director Diana Alarcon arrived on the day of the vote, requesting that CMs support the bill. It left community members and CMs feeling “blindsided,” says Sepulveda.
The letter stated, in part, that “LPR information will NOT be shared with ICE for any type of immigration enforcement.” Sepulveda attacked this claim on the council floor that night, calling it “irresponsible” and “blatantly untrue.” She warned her colleagues that MNPD would be unable to prevent ICE from obtaining LPR data in response to a subpoena.
Sepulveda’s warnings, which date back to the beginning of the LPR debate in late 2020, have gone largely unheeded. At times, colleagues have dismissed her calls for concern outright. During one lengthy debate in early 2021, District 26 Councilmember Courtney Johnston — the primary sponsor of BL2021-961 — stated, “ICE doesn’t care about LPR data.” This claim, however, is belied by the existence of a contract between ICE and major LPR manufacturer Vigilant Solutions for access to LPR data gathered by law enforcement agencies across the country.
Once the bill passed, Councilmember At-Large Bob Mendes started work on several follow-up bills to address what he saw as areas of agreement among proponents and opponents of LPRs. One of those bills, BL2022-1115, would prohibit the MNPD from using LPR data to assist with immigration enforcement, essentially codifying the promise made by Chief Drake in his letter to the council. Several CMs, including two who supported LPRs, signed onto the legislation. Then the Council Office released its legal analysis of the bill, which concluded that it would violate TCA §7-68-101 — colloquially referred to as the “anti-sanctuary-city law” — passed by the Tennessee state legislature in 2018.
The law precludes any local government entity or official from adopting a “sanctuary policy,” which it defines as “any directive, order, ordinance, resolution, practice, or policy, whether formally enacted, informally adopted, or otherwise effectuated” that could interfere with federal immigration enforcement efforts.
Read strictly, this could mean that even Chief Drake’s letter — and the promise it contained, whether enforceable or not — would violate state law, a point that CM Mendes raised rhetorically during a discussion of his bill at a recent council committee meeting. At the very least, it seems apparent that there is nothing the Metro Council or the MNPD could legally do to prohibit data sharing with ICE for immigration-enforcement purposes.
In response to a request for comment, MNPD public affairs director Don Aaron provides the following statement: “The MNPD is not asking for LPRs for immigration enforcement. The department does not intend to proactively provide LPR information to ICE for the sole purpose of immigration enforcement.”
Mendes says that while he knew there was “likely tension with state law,” he heard common ground among CMs and the police department that “nobody wanted to use the information for immigration enforcement,” and he wanted to ensure that the Metro Council had a venue for further discussion of the issue.
Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition director Lisa Sherman Luna hopes the legal opinion from the Council Office will cause CMs to rethink their support for LPRs, which she says will have a “chilling effect on immigrant communities and their participation with Metro government.” Sabina Mohyuddin, executive director of the American Muslim Advisory Council, echoes this concern, noting that the use of surveillance technology to target communities of color throughout the country has led to “an increased sense of distrust, especially in new surveillance technology.”
Andrés Martínez, director of policy and communications at Conexión Américas and former chair of the Community Oversight Board, is concerned about the possibility of further state preemption. “We can implement as many policies as we want to — to protect private information, to protect people’s civil liberties — but the state can come in and undo that whenever they want,” he says.
Reflecting on repeated attempts to warn her colleagues about this possibility, Sepulveda says, “It was almost like we weren’t believed.” Now she appears to be vindicated in her concerns.
“We passed legislation,” Sepulveda says, “and these are the consequences of that legislation.”
