Tennessee AG Exposes Federal Release of Illegal Immigrants Convicted of Dangerous Crimes

Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti announced last week that following a successful lawsuit by the Tennessee Attorney General’s Office, United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (“ICE”) was forced to produce previously undisclosed information about the agency’s release of thousands of detained migrants, including dangerous convicted criminals. The hundreds of pages of documents obtained shed light on federal authorities’ since-abandoned plan to transport potentially thousands of “single adult” immigration detainees into Tennessee.

The records show that ICE’s plan to release migrants into this State was derailed by pushback from Tennessee’s Governor and U.S. Senators and ultimately stopped through successful litigation by the Tennessee Attorney General’s Office and other States. The information further reveals that although ICE abandoned its failed plan for the mass release of detainees into Tennessee, the agency nonetheless released over 7,000 detainees directly from its Louisiana facilities at that time, including more than 30 who were assigned ICE’s highest security-threat level. Released detainees had criminal records, including homicide, sexual assault, aggravated assault with a weapon, armed robbery, kidnapping, smuggling aliens, drug trafficking, burglary, and fraud.

“The federal government’s single most important job is to keep dangerous people out of our country and instead it has let killers and rapists illegally cross our border and walk free on our streets,” said Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti. “While the urgent work to fix our broken immigration system continues in Washington, my Office will keep fighting for transparency and accountability.”

In December 2022, the Governor’s Office learned that ICE had been coordinating with local immigration-rights groups and Nashville officials to release large numbers of detainees into Tennessee before the anticipated termination of the federal  government’s Title 42 public health order. With support from the Governor, the Tennessee  Attorney General’s Office immediately worked to obtain answers from the federal government. When federal authorities failed to respond to Tennessee’s Freedom of Information Act requests, the Attorney General’s Office filed suit.

As a result of the litigation, ICE searched for and produced hundreds of pages of responsive records that revealed the following:

• Coordination between ICE, Nashville city officials, and a Tennessee immigration nonprofit to arrange for the mass release of detainees into Tennessee
• ICE originally planned to release thousands of single, adult, non-citizen detainees from its Louisiana detention facilities into Tennessee
• Data from ICE showing the release from its Louisiana detention facilities of non-citizen detainees with violent criminal records, including murder, rape, and kidnapping

You can find the documents from ICE here.

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