U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has reportedly started arresting illegal immigrants who appear for their court dates in Tennessee, according to a Memphis lawyer who claimed on Monday that federal authorities made eight arrests at the Memphis Immigration Court.
Memphis immigration attorney Andrew Rankin told Fox 13 on Monday that ICE agents were at the downtown Memphis courthouse last week, where they spent hours arresting individuals who arrived for a court date.
He told the outlet, “these are non-citizens who have had actual court hearings, whether it’s a preliminary hearing or a trial,” who are “being arrested literally outside the courtroom, in the hallway or at the elevator right by the exist.”
According to Rankin, this is just the latest escalation in immigration enforcement, which has picked up for months. In response, he told Fox 13 that he is advising his clients to “strategize about what happens post-detention.”
Although the circumstances of the reported arrests in Memphis are unclear, they appear to align with the new strategy by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), as reported by CBS News on Friday.
That outlet reported that DHS has been terminating certain illegal immigrants’ court cases on the day they are expected to arrive in court, instead placing migrants who cannot prove they have been in the country for more than two years into an expedited removal process, allowing the federal government to chip way at a years-long backlog of 4 million immigration court cases.
Federal immigration enforcement in Memphis appears to be increasing after the city became the subject of national attention when ICE arrested three Mexican nationals in a high profile action at a food truck in February, with the federal agency telling The Tennessee Star the arrests came after it received information about possible “labor trafficking” in Tennessee.
Memphis is poised to receive additional federal law enforcement assistance from the FBI, as Director Kash Patel said last week that he was surprised to learn the city has the highest murder rate in the country.
“I didn’t know this until my confirmation process, but Memphis, Tennessee, is the homicide capital of America, per capita,” said Patel, after explaining that human trafficking generally follows the country’s interstate system.
Tom Pappert is the lead reporter for The Tennessee Star, and also reports for The Pennsylvania Daily Star and The Arizona Sun Times. Follow Tom on X/Twitter. Email tips to pappert.tom@proton.me.