Sarah Grace Taylor over at the Nashville Banner went through 50 hours of footage and immigration records to try to find out exactly how Nashville's May 2025 immigration sweeps went down. She reports:
Footage also captured a pattern of demeaning conduct from law enforcement, who used a mix of pejoratives to describe the targets, prevented subjects from contacting their families and physically marked detainees to track who made the arrest, as teams of law enforcement apparently competed to detain the most people.
Let me repeat that, so that we can all be grossed out together: “and physically marked detainees to track who made the arrest, as teams of law enforcement apparently competed to detain the most people.”
Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, along with members of the Tennessee Highway Patrol, made a game out of people’s suffering. We have people out there interacting with the public every day — people the public cannot avoid — who take pleasure in inflicting suffering.
You know how there’s a theory that we have fewer serial killers now because we’ve successfully limited the general public’s exposure to lead? Basically, the hypothesis is that widespread lead poisoning back in the early to mid-1900s caused a lot of brain damage and aggression in people, with the most extreme cases becoming serial killers. Less lead exposure, fewer people at that far end to become serial killers.
But then we read about state troopers writing with Sharpies on people so that they can track which team made the most arrests, or you read about them using the arrest of one person to lure the people who care about them out and then laughing about it, and I can’t help but wonder if these extreme lead-poisoning cases haven't so much decreased as just found jobs that will pay them to dehumanize people and take pleasure in inflicting pain. Maybe there aren’t fewer of them. Maybe they’re just in places where they don’t get counted.
Opinion: When politicians finally get scared of being associated with you, they will abandon you. They will denounce you.
I just wrote about this last month in regard to ICE agents, but ICE eventually goes home. State troopers are home. They live here with us. Once you discover that a person finds it fun to lure people out and trap them — once you know that they can cause people to cry and laugh about it — how do you sit next to them in church? How do you feel OK about letting your kids play with their kids?
This is so deeply fucked-up. We, the taxpayers of Tennessee — and let me remind you, that is everybody in Tennessee who buys anything, including people of all immigration statuses — pay people to disregard their humanity on our behalf so that they can do these monstrous things and laugh about it. Then we just live next to them, and what? Think they won’t do the things we paid them to do to us, and with a clear conscience?
One of the most pernicious things we, as a society, believe is that a person can genuinely be two different ways at once. That a man can write a number on a woman’s arm, laughing with his buddies at her fear and despair at work, and then he can set that mindset aside and come home and be a good neighbor, husband and father.
In actuality, one of those things is a performance you do in order to get to the other thing. I hope, deeply, that these troopers are playing at being Torquemada but are inherently good people. But that seems unlikely. People who recognize the humanity of others tend to break in those circumstances. (See every member of the military with PTSD.)
Instead, it’s more likely that the normal guy is the mask, and the men taking pleasure in ruining people’s lives are who they really are. And we’ve let them loose on ourselves.
Why are we doing this? Why do we accept it? Do we think we can just offer up our immigrant neighbors to them and that then they’ll calm down? Just sacrifice a few people and that will appease them?
They’re having fun. It’s a game they’re having fun playing. I cannot stress this enough: People do not stop doing things they find pleasurable. If we think they’ll satiate themselves on people who are here without the right documents, we are deeply stupid.
If you can’t be bothered to speak out against this for the sake of the people being affected right now, then do it for your own sake — before they work down their lists and get to you.
