Shelby County Mayor Lee Harris accused the Memphis Safe Task Force of unlawful stops and racial profiling on Tuesday.
Harris held a press briefing to discuss the Memphis Safe Task Force arrests since the start of its third week of enforcement and the growing concerns the Memphis Hispanic community has regarding the task force.
He said members of the Hispanic community are being targeted, regardless of their legal status.
Immigrant Justice Program Director, Colton Bane, of Community Legal Center’s Immigrant Justice Program said he’s representing several clients who were racially profiled and arrested, despite their legal status.
Bane says there have been reports of law enforcement not returning licenses to Hispanic drivers after traffic stops.
“Not only are they racially profiling and pulling over Hispanic drivers with no cause, they’re then also creating future legal problems for these individuals,” said Bane.
Where have you been?
Not that I expect this to change their behavior, but just to clarify, Memphis is under a full federal occupation (so not just ICE and BP). These aren’t just immigration agents. There are about 20 different federal and state agencies (including the TN department of wildlife of federal departments like Health and Human Services??) who are in Memphis. The full list is insane but I will link it here if you’re interested.
They have apparently been given access to TN highway patrol cars and often there will be caravans of unmarked cars that ride along with the highway patrol cars and make these stops. I’m assuming this is so that whatever you pull people over for, there will be multiple departments there to figure out something you can arrest or ticket the person for.
Unrelated to immigration, they’re just locking everyone up for any reason. They’ve allegedly even targeted and arrested people on bicycles for things like not signaling properly to make a pretextual stop.