Mayor Paul Young confirmed late Monday in a contentious town hall meeting with Hispanic residents that the Memphis Police Department is cooperating with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.
His statements before a crowd of hundreds in East Memphis came as a remarkable development considering that city leaders for years had denied any collaboration between the police force and ICE.
Young said his aim in allowing the cooperation was to steer federal agents away from mass deportation and toward helping MPD investigate murders and other violent crimes.
If he fought the administration of President Donald Trump, as officials in Chicago are doing, the federal government would respond with even harsher tactics, he said.
“I believe that the posture of Chicago has caused the federal government to flood the community with ICE agents focused on immigration,” Young said, drawing occasional applause. “That is why I have chosen to make sure that our police department is working with the federal teams to direct them towards our problem, which is crime.”
But the mayor received sharp pushback from some in the crowd at Mullins United Methodist Church where a big group of mostly Hispanic residents turned out to hear Young speak alongside Police Chief Cerelyn “CJ” Davis.
“This morning, they took away a mother. The mother left behind a one-year-old child,” Maria Alejandra Oceja said in Spanish. A key leader of community group Vecindarios901, Oceja said it’s one of many similar cases of parents arrested and children left behind.
At another point, a woman shouted at the mayor from the back of the church. “Should we wait until all of our family members get taken away?”
But Shelby County District Attorney Steve Mulroy, who attended the Monday night meeting, told the Institute for Public Service Reporting that he has been receiving regular reports from the task force.
“I think people expected it to be about crime. And even on immigration — immigrants who are criminals — that’s not what we’re seeing,” Mulroy said.
About 20 percent of the arrests are immigration-related, he said. What proportion of those involve immigrants accused of committing crimes?
“I don’t know precisely, but not many,’’ Mulroy said. “There doesn’t seem to be any indication of reports of criminal activity other than unlawful presence in the United States.”
Entry into the country without inspection can be charged as a crime, yet unlawful presence in the United States is generally treated as a civil immigration offense, not a crime.
The light federal enforcement in non-border areas meant that most unauthorized immigrants in Memphis managed to live normal lives: working in construction and other industries and frequently buying homes, sending children to school and sometimes launching their own businesses.
Today, the situation has changed dramatically. The Trump administration and Congress are dedicating billions of dollars toward large-scale deportation, regardless of the immigrants’ criminal records.
Seventy-two percent immigrants in detention centers today have no criminal convictions, according to the Transactional Access Records Clearinghouse at Syracuse University.
Obviously, this child would have become a criminal, possibly even a terrorist, or even (gasp) a democrat… clearly, there was no other way.
I saw a video recently of an ICE agent that got pulled over for a DUI with his kids in his car, and he started off all cocky and shit talking the cop for even pulling him over. Then he ended up begging him not to take his kid from him and saying he shouldn’t lose him over one little mistake.
And it’s just… What tf do you even say to people who have no problem doing something like that to other people, when they know exactly what they’re doing. It’s one thing to imagine ICE agents as like 19 year olds with no world experience and frontal lobes that are still developing.
But how can somebody be so callous about causing so much heartbreak and trauma when they know that it must feel like you’re stuck in your worst fucking nightmare. And that doing this everyday to completely innocent people, who literally didn’t even make the decision to drink and drive with their kids in the car, is just your normal job. Like how do you sleep at night?
Honestly, maybe he doesn’t, and that awful feeling has something to do with why he would feel the need to drink to get through a normal day.