White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, left, speaks during a roundtable discussion on public safety at a Tennessee Air National Guard Base, Monday, March 23, 2026, in Memphis, Tenn., attended by President Donald Trump. (AP Photo/Bruce Newman)

Even though Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operations in Minneapolis and Chicago have captured national attention in recent months, Tennessee is embracing the Trump administration’s unprecedented war on immigrants in ways other states are not.

Journalist detained

On March 4, Nashville Noticias reporter Estefany Rodriguez, who is originally from Colombia, was arrested by ICE agents and was held in detention for 15 days. Her attorneys filed a lawsuit arguing that the arrest was unlawful and amounts to retaliation against Rodriguez’s First Amendment rights. Rodriguez frequently reported on local ICE raids in Tennessee.

“These speech-related consequences are not side effects of an action with some other purpose,” her attorneys wrote. “They are, instead, the purpose of the government’s actions as to Rodriguez, which are intended to silence viewpoints with which the Trump Administration disagrees.”

The U.S. Attorney’s office in Tennessee responded by maintaining that Rodriguez is an “illegal alien” who does not have First Amendment protections, which is heavily disputed by Rodriguez’s lawyers and by previous Supreme Court decisions.

Rodriguez legally entered the United States with a tourist visa in 2021 and is married to a U.S. citizen. She also has a pending application for a green card.

According to documents filed by Rodriguez’s attorneys last week, ICE held her in a county jail in Alabama and forced her into isolation for five days after an officer suspected she had contracted lice. She was eventually forced to strip naked in a shower while a detention officer poured a chemical on her head that burned her eyes. She has also had limited contact with her husband and seven-year-old daughter.

Last Monday, a judge granted her a release on a $10,000 bond, and she was released on Friday.  

Rodriguez’s arrest and detention was vilified by a coalition of 46 press freedom groups. The situation was the latest of a disturbing trend of the Trump administration using a variety of efforts to seemingly dissuade journalists and citizens from exercising their rights to report on and protest the actions of the federal government.

Evidence of ICE using racial profiling in Tennessee

A joint investigation conducted by several news outlets collected and analyzed thousands of records and police body/dashboard camera footage from last May’s “Operation Flood the Zone,” a partner operation in Nashville, Tenn. between ICE and Tennessee Highway Patrol. The report found that 75% of the immigrants detained in Nashville did not have a criminal record, despite the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) routinely stating that ICE operations are detaining “evil horrible human beings” and “the worst of the worst” criminals.

Nashville’s NewsChannel 5 published a video review of dozens of traffic stops, which found evidence of racial profiling and discrimination against individuals who spoke broken English.

“Immigration 2026” agenda

Unlike states like Illinois and Minnesota, the Tennessee legislature and governorship are dominated by Republican politicians willing to adopt the Trump administration’s anti-immigration platform. Reports indicate that White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, who has been credited with shaping much of the administration’s immigration policy, has been meeting with Tennessee leaders for months to craft a new state-level policy framework dubbed the “Immigration 2026” agenda.

The Tennessee General Assembly has already enacted bills that require local law enforcement entities to assist ICE operations and prohibit citizens from harboring individuals they “know or should have known” to have entered the country illegally.

New bills advancing through the Tennessee legislature this session include:

–HB 0793: Forces public school districts to verify citizenship or immigration status of students, and allow schools to refuse to enroll students who are unlawfully present in the United States  

–HB 1704: Creates a misdemeanor for immigrants without legal status to be present in Tennessee 90 days after a deportation order is issued by an immigration judge

–HB 1708: Requires driver’s license tests to be administered in English

–HB 1705: Requires all state and local governments to use the federal E-Verify system to verify a potential employee’s immigration status. It also gives the Tennessee Attorney General the ability to withhold funding from local governments, including school districts, that do not use the E-Verify system.

–HB 2219: Requires local law enforcement entities to sign cooperation agreements with ICE (287 g). The state would be allowed to withhold funding from entities who do not agree.