Stephanie Teatro, co-director of Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition
Before Donald Trump became president on Jan. 20, the Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition’s work was defined by one of the bigger questions that came out of the 2016 election cycle: Who gets to be an American, and what does it mean to live in a multicultural country with shifting demographics?
“What we’ve seen in Tennessee and in Nashville has been the best and worst instincts of people responding to demographic change,” says Stephanie Teatro, co-director of TIRRC, a statewide organization led by immigrants and refugees that works on everything from community education to lobbying to direct services for immigrants and refugees.
Teatro, a 30-year-old Canadian-American, talked to the Scene about what TIRRC is doing to triage in the face of the executive order from Trump, how local politicians are handling the order and what the group expects in the next four years.
This fight over immigration policies and accepting refugees has been happening for a long time, but how has the past week been different? We had our share of policy fights in Nashville with English-only legislation attempts and otherwise. But what I think is different about the executive order, of course, is that it’s coming from the highest office in the land. I think that after a historically divisive election, people were really nervous and wondered what the president might do. We heard the promises he made, but people weren’t really sure. In his very first week in office, not only did he declare that every undocumented immigrant in our community is a threat to public safety and should be a priority for deportation — he said that our cities are going to have to play a role in his deportation force. He said that green-card holders, folks who own houses and businesses and have lived here for many, many, many years, aren’t allowed back in. Of course, it’s devastating and heartbreaking and having immediate impacts on families. But it was clearly an overreach. If anything, he laid bare the big question on the table about what kind of country we are.
What about this idea that the ban is temporary and that it’s really only an inconvenience? I think there’s two answers to that question, the first around the people who are directly affected by this. I think the reason the media has been so important, but also the courage of families to share their stories has been so important, is because this isn’t an inconvenience. These are people who either have been waiting from the refugee resettlement side, people who have already been waiting for years in refugee camps and have gone through our very extreme vetting program, and finally pretty much had tickets in hand. There was a light at the end of the tunnel. It’s not an inconvenience to them. It’s definitely more than an inconvenience to families that are here, families who are waiting for their spouses or their parents or whomever to come with them, who now just saw another block. But why it’s also not just an inconvenience and is not just temporary is because I think that Tennesseans need to know that our elected officials have been doing this for a while before President Trump was elected, before the moratorium. Our state legislature was suing to stop refugee resettlement. Even after the temporary ban on refugees is lifted, this ban on Syrians is indefinite. It’s clear that the president is willing to use extreme measures and that our state legislature is going to try to ride his coattails. We see this as the most extreme and immediate piece to respond to, but we’re under no illusions that this is the last attack on religious liberty or people’s right to move or reunite with their families.
How do you see that playing out? You said the state legislature will likely ride the coattails of Donald Trump. But can you think of anything specifically that you’re worried about in Tennessee?
I think that this backlash that’s taking over, again, is not new for us. We’ve defeated more than 150 anti-immigrant bills in the state legislature, and we’ll be back this year. If the protests this week are any indication, we have a lot more people behind us. Under President Obama, all of the really state-based anti-immigrant policies we saw when our state tried to implement Arizona-style legislation or otherwise was based on the ... [idea that] President Obama wasn’t doing his job, because the federal government wasn’t doing anything about immigration, states had to take it into their own hands. It is a question now, if President Trump is taking on immigration in the most extreme ways, what the state sees their role as. We’ve always said that immigration is fundamentally a federal issue, and what states and local communities should be worried about is how to make sure that everybody is contributing and everybody is participating and not making it more difficult, which is what the state has done. I think that there are members of the legislature who are eyeing their next election. They saw Donald Trump carry the state. We assume they’re sticking a finger in the political wind. Whether or not their policies will have any meaningful impact, I think they’re probably trying to figure out what they can run on in 2018. It would be our assessment that that’s a political miscalculation, that Donald Trump’s immigration policies are extreme and failing and divisive, and that ultimately is not what Tennesseans are going to want here.
What are you dealing with now as an organization? This has been an incredibly difficult week. We’re an organization with a really multi-ethnic membership base. Really, definitely not in my time at TIRRC, but probably not in our history, has our entire membership base been under attack at the same time. Our priority over the last week has really been community education. We’ve been fielding hundreds of calls about people asking what this means for their families, whether it’s undocumented immigrants wondering how to set up power of attorney to make sure their kids have somewhere to go if they’re deported. We got calls from Nepalese refugees, folks who are not impacted by the seven-country ban, but also whose families were in the pipeline to join them in Nashville, and that door has just closed. We’ve been creating a lot of materials to get to the communities to let them know how they might be impacted by the ban, what their rights are, what their options are. We’re trying to stand up some kind of emergency response services for a lot of people who have visas or who have families abroad that are stuck trying to connect them with legal resources.
To the security aspect, which is what the people who do agree with this executive order cling to when they’re talking about it, is there in any way that you find that to be true, or do you think in some ways it might be counterproductive? We know that the threats of global terrorism are real and that the fears Tennesseans feel when they see different terrorist attacks abroad are real, and they are powerful. Of course, it is the duty of the federal government and our elected officials to keep people safe. Absolutely. But for example, refugees are the most vetted travelers to come into the United States. There is already overly extreme vetting in place. I think it is true that our national leaders and local elected officials do have work to do to keep our communities safe. We are not discounting that at all. But we think it is opportunistic and shows a real lack of leadership for our elected officials to go after refugees specifically. … The anti-refugee movement used to be fringe, and the only place they could find to pass laws was in Tennessee. But now we’re seeing it happen not only in other states but also at the national level. Bills that we saw drafted and introduced here in 2011 showed up in at least 10 other states last year for the first time. While I think information is power, and hopefully cooler heads prevail in the federal policy-making world, it’s not just merely that they didn’t know. It’s that the people we’ve elected and the people they’ve surrounded themselves with are known to drive an anti-immigrant and anti-refugee agenda. This is week one. We expect more.
Are you satisfied with the way that local officials have reacted? One of our immediate tasks, as well, is to communicate with the Nashville community, but especially with [the Metro Council], the sheriff, the mayor, the police chief, school boards. We’re statewide, so not only in Nashville but across the state, let them know what their options are, because it seems it’s likely that many elected officials saw the first executive order around punishing cities or thinking about things that the state has done or might do as limiting their options. But that’s just frankly not true. I think that we expect a lot out of our Nashville elected officials. We know that the city supports immigrants and refugees and does not want to see taxpayer resources, city personnel or city government agencies used in support of this discriminatory agenda. We will expect a lot of our city officials. But we think it’s our job now to help them understand their options and to support them in making, implementing those policies. It’s not that we’re satisfied or unsatisfied. I think that we see it as our job to educate them about their options, put pressure on them to make the right choice, and support them when they do.
