There’s been an overall increase in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrests in Tennessee since the start of 2025, and an additional uptick in the past couple of months — at least that’s what Spring Miller observes as senior director of legal strategy at Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition.
When it comes to civil litigation, without a public defender system for people who’ve been arrested and detained, the nonprofit advocacy organization stands in the gap.
“Family members who are affected by this have to turn to this patchwork system of private attorneys and a handful of nonprofits,” Miller tells the Scene. “But those nonprofits, including us, get way more requests for help than we can handle. So it just feels like we’re in a crisis.”
In late July, TIRRC — alongside the American Civil Liberties Union of Louisiana, the Chattanooga immigration legal defense organization Sanctuary of the South, the Robert and Ethel Kennedy Human Rights Center, and Amnesty International — submitted a formal complaint to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security on behalf of a Nashville mother who was detained while taking her two young children to the doctor’s office.
Maria Perez (a pseudonym) has a 2-year-old with Down syndrome and a 10-month-old whom she was breastfeeding when she was detained — making the arrest counter to ICE’s own directive not to detain or arrest pregnant, postpartum or nursing individuals except under exceptional circumstances. Perez is seeking asylum from domestic violence in Guatemala, has no criminal history and has complied with every step of the immigration process since arriving, TIRRC states. After being taken into custody in Tennessee, Perez was sent to an ICE processing center in Louisiana. As of this writing, she remains in custody.
“ICE and DHS continue to show blatant disregard not just for their own policies but for basic humanity,” Miller says on behalf of TIRRC. “Ripping a nursing mother from her vulnerable children and shipping her to another state is almost unimaginable, yet ICE has turned a blind eye to their own directives and has done just that to Maria.”
Attorneys say once-routine immigration cases are now ending in detention
While many of Tennessee’s ICE arrests have happened through jails, TIRRC focuses on cases that for the most part fall into two categories: arrests at traffic stops, and arrests at ICE offices. In the former, while the Tennessee Highway Patrol has worked closely with ICE, Miller says she has not observed Metro Nashville Police Department taking part in such operations. But the latter strategy has become increasingly prolific in recent months, she says. A Nashville-based florist named Melanys was detained in July during a routine immigration appointment. Miller describes the arrests as “designed to terrorize.”
Miller says people often comply with ICE’s calls to come to their facilities because they’re trying to comply with the immigration process overall. Sometimes a call is out of the blue, and sometimes it’s part of a routine check-in schedule.
“In a lot of those cases, they can’t be deported until there’s been an adjudication or a determination of their application that’s pending, and the only reason it’s still pending is because the government hasn’t resolved it,” she says. “So they’re being detained for no reason.”
Some of the people TIRRC works with have green-card applications that have been pending for years, Miller says. The delay is not necessarily due to eligibility, but because the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services is backlogged. Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals recipients are part of this too, as the bi-yearly DACA renewal process has slowed to a crawl.
“Those are strategies that are ensnaring so many of our neighbors, community members, people with really deep ties who are just a part of our community, and also people who’ve been trying to comply with our very backlogged and very complex and very byzantine immigration process,” Miller says.
The Tennessee General Assembly’s Republican supermajority, with help from top Trump adviser Stephen Miller, made immigration its top issue this year. Among legislation that passed during the 2026 session was a bill that requires local sheriffs to work with ICE, and another that makes it a class-A misdemeanor for any undocumented adults to be in the state following a final order of removal.
Detention power is not criminal — it’s civil, Miller explains. Thanks to new ICE and Department of Justice interpretations of long-standing laws regarding detention and bond eligibility, many of those detained are not eligible for bond hearings, including everyone who entered without inspection, regardless of their criminal history or lack thereof.
The only lawful use of detaining is to ensure that someone shows up to their immigration court date, or because someone is a risk to public safety. In the case of Nashville journalist Estefany Rodriguez, ICE claimed the former. Rodriguez, a Spanish-language reporter for Nashville Noticias, was arrested and detained earlier this year while driving a car with the news outlet’s logo on it. She had been closely following ICE arrests in South Nashville, and her attorneys accused ICE of retaliation. ICE claimed she had overstayed her visa, which her attorneys denied.
“We are seeing so many arrests in which neither of those criteria are met,” Miller says. “We are seeing just a really cruel and abusive use of that detention power.”
