MEMPHIS, TENN. — When President Trump announced an anti-crime task force for Memphis last fall, federal and local officials never mentioned immigration enforcement as a goal.
But the influx of federal agents into the city has led to widespread immigration arrests — a majority without criminal convictions, according to an Institute for Public Service Reporting data analysis.
NPR reviewed arrest data and spoke with lawyers, immigrants, activists and community members to piece together the task force’s impact on Memphis over the past 10 months.
It found paralyzed immigrant neighborhoods, where scenes played out reminiscent of Chicago and Minneapolis at the height of targeted federal immigration enforcement actions. Aid networks ramped up their work to help immigrants too fearful to leave their homes. Hotlines rang out with calls from panicked immigrants. And routine traffic stops led to immigration arrests.
All of this has happened without the glare of the national spotlight and amid muted public outcry, as local and state leaders have largely cooperated with the federal government.
Meanwhile, Trump has said he has plans for similar task forces elsewhere, particularly in Republican-led states where he has more political buy-in.
“All roads lead to immigration enforcement with this administration,” says Chioma Chukwu, executive director at American Oversight, a nonprofit, nonpartisan watchdog that has been investigating the Trump administration’s use of multi-agency task forces like the ones in Memphis and Washington, D.C.
She says one of the aspects her organization is tracking is the way in which the administration has consistently conflated illegal immigration with crime, to help in what she calls “mission creep,” particularly in places where anti-crime rhetoric might be more popular. .
“This administration has used crime as a pretext for furthering and advancing its immigration enforcement agenda because they understand that immigration may not be top of mind in maybe non-border states in the way that it is in border states,” says Chukwu.
Trump launched the task force last fall, along with Tennessee Republican Gov. Bill Lee, despite crime being at a 25-year low in the city. For nearly a year, more than a dozen federal agencies as well as hundreds of Tennessee National Guard members have been working closely with local and state law enforcement.
Trump called it a “replica” of the ongoing anti-crime task force in Washington, D.C. saying it would focus on “dangerous career criminals.” That task force also had a significant immigration enforcement aspect to it.
“President Trump’s crime task forces in Washington D.C. and Memphis have yielded tremendous results for local communities,” White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson wrote to NPR when asked about the immigration aspect of the task forces, listing impacts without providing evidence.
The vast majority of the arrests made by the task force — whether for immigration or otherwise — have been for nonviolent crimes, according to data from the city.
Emily Williams, a spokesperson for the U.S. Marshals Service, which leads the Memphis task force, reiterated that immigration enforcement is “only one aspect” of the mission and denied that anyone is being targeted.
“Our primary focus is violent offenders. We arrest anyone who is breaking the law — if you are in the country illegally, you are committing a crime,” Williams wrote in a statement.
Advocates braced for arrests
When the Memphis task force was announced, immigration lawyers and advocates in the city had already been tracking what was happening in D.C. and preparing.
The immigrant community in Memphis — mostly Hispanic and Haitian — is only about 10% of the city’s population, but it’s also the fastest growing segment, according to U.S. Census data.
“As soon as the announcement came out, I was really clear-eyed about what was going to be happening,” says Casey Bryant, executive director of Advocates for Immigrant Rights in Memphis, which provides legal services.
Bryant remembers that much of the media coverage at the time was about the deployment of hundreds of Tennessee National Guard members to the city, but that felt like a distraction. “It was really going to be about the federal agencies that were riding the coattails of the National Guard.”
Maria Oceja, a co-founder of Vecindarios 901, a local rapid-response network that has been tracking U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement activity in the city since the first Trump administration, says she began making the rounds to local officials, asking if they thought the task force would be focused on immigration enforcement.
Brad Vest for NPR/Brad Vest
“I was like, they’re not coming to Memphis for just crime. I’m pretty sure this is going to be an ICE operation,” she remembers telling them.
Oceja felt like her fears were confirmed when members of Trump’s administration visited Memphis to roll out the task force in October. Stephen Miller — the chief architect for the White House immigration agenda — told the assembled law enforcement officers: “You are unleashed.”
She says that very first evening, the hotline her organization runs received so many calls, they had to have four people answer it simultaneously throughout the night. That lasted for months.
‘We weren’t sleeping’
The first few months of the Memphis Safe Task Force brought hundreds of immigration arrests, a sixfold increase from previous months, despite local and federal officials continuing to say the task force was focusing on crime. A vast majority of those arrests were for people with no criminal convictions, according to analysis of those arrests by the Institute for Public Service Reporting in Memphis.
Those trends mirror the first months of the D.C. Safe and Beautiful Task Force.
The Memphis Safe Task Force does not release a breakdown of its arrests. A dashboard maintained by the city, which has gotten pushback from the community for its lack of detail and transparency, had immigration arrests listed for the first few weeks, but those numbers disappeared.
Much of the task force’s operations have been focused on traffic stops, and the immigration arrests seem to have happened largely during those, according to activists and constitutional observers.
“That’s been the main way that families have been separated,” says Oceja, of Vecindarios 901, noting that in the first few months, law enforcement was “pulling people over left and right.”
She says the hotline was getting so many calls reporting traffic stops on well-traveled routes that they eventually set up a Facebook channel where people could receive alerts on the safest ways to go.
“We weren’t sleeping,” she remembers. “It was a very, very traumatic time for our community.”
Hunter Demster, a Memphis resident who films as much task force activity as he can, says the traffic stops seem to be centered in the two main Hispanic neighborhoods in the city.
“It was very evident that this was an immigration operation at its core,” he says. “This isn’t necessarily about finding the worst of the worst or fixing crime. It’s about targeting Black and brown folk.”
Community leaders say the shock the task force brought was immediate and far-reaching, mirroring scenes from places like Minneapolis and Chicago during the height of immigration raids, as people were afraid to leave their homes for fear of being detained.
“There was a spike of fear and panic,” says Mauricio Calvo, president and CEO of Latino Memphis. “Kids were not going to school, people were not showing up to work. We were getting calls from medical providers saying people were not coming in.”
He says now, 10 months into the task force presence, the number of arrests seems to have slowed and many have been trying to return to some sense of normalcy.
A lingering presence
But throughout Memphis, signs of the federal task force – which does not have a set end date — are still constant, from Tennessee National Guard troops stationed in grocery store parking lots and along tourist areas of downtown to convoys of unmarked SUVs with tinted windows lining thoroughfares.
Mutual aid groups are still seeing high demand too. Amber Hampton runs a makeshift food pantry out of her garage in a suburb of the city. She’s parked her family car in the driveway to bring in shelves, filling them with canned food, dry goods, toiletries and cleaning supplies.
Hampton works with a network of volunteers to deliver boxes of groceries to immigrant families impacted by the task force, many of whom are still limiting their time out of the house to only the most essential activities.
She says when the federal immigration raids in Minneapolis were happening in January, she remembered thinking it was really similar to what was happening in Memphis, except without nearly as much attention, in part because local officials were welcoming.
But she does think that there is a shift in perception starting to happen in the Memphis community at large, as the impact that the task force has had on the immigrant community starts to become more apparent.
“I think as more stories are coming out, people are realizing that what is happening on the ground, is not what they were sold,” Hampton says.
A teen’s arrest
When 18-year-old Yasser Lopez thinks back to the moment he was detained by federal immigration officers in Memphis in February, he remembers being confused, wondering what he did wrong.
“But then I remembered that this is the new norm,” he says in Spanish through a translator. “This is what has been happening all around the city. Now, it just happened to me.”
Lopez was arrested for being in the country illegally while riding as a passenger in a car on his way to a soccer game, according to the Department of Homeland Security. The car was stopped by Memphis police, and immigration agents followed. He was sent to a nearby detention facility and held without bond.
His classmates staged a walkout in protest of his detention and his case was covered in the local media, then picked up by the ACLU. Lopez was later released after a U.S. district court judge found his arrest and detention violated his due process.
Ronnie Davis, a barber in the Frayser neighborhood of Memphis, was cautiously optimistic about the task force when NPR spoke with him ten months ago. But the immigration element to it — including Lopez’s case, which he heard about on the news — has given him pause.
“I do not want children pulled from cars and out of schools,” he says.
Davis says he does feel safer since the task force arrived, mainly because of the overwhelming presence of law enforcement now in his neighborhood, but he has noticed the impact it’s had on the immigrant community, saying some of his friends have been deported.
“They are only touting the good things,” Davis says about the way officials have praised the federal intervention, saying that maybe those things have benefited him. “But had I been Hispanic, I’d be terrified. If I was Haitian, I’d be terrified.”
Local cooperation
One of the most notable differences between Memphis and other cities that have experienced federal interventions under this administration is the cooperation at the state level, making it hard for local pushback to take root.
In a visit to Memphis in March, Trump declared the Memphis Safe Task Force a success, saying that crime had been “fixed” in the city. He sat at a table with Gov. Lee, along with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Stephen Miller, the architect of Trump’s immigration policy.
“What has happened here has created a generational change,” Gov. Lee said, focusing entirely on crime reduction without mentioning immigration enforcement, but thanking Miller directly for his focus on the task force.
Crime has gone down in Memphis since the task force was launched, according to local police data. But crime in the city has fallen steadily since 2023, when it hit a near-record high.
Memphis Mayor Paul Young, a Democrat, was not at that roundtable, telling local press a “personal” matter kept him from attending.
At his own press conference later, Young talked about wanting to advocate for the community as best he could with the federal resources.
When asked directly about the high immigration arrests related to the task force, Young said that he was not “supportive,” but could not control it, as federal and state officials were in agreement.
“My goal is to make sure that I can control what I can control. And there’s no mayor in America that can control the immigration aspects of this,” he said.
