This fight was supposed to have been put to bed 160 years ago

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents riled up folks when they conducted a dragnet in a South Nashville neighborhood a month ago and detained nearly 200 people.

But city streets aren’t the only place where federal agents are picking up immigrants for deportation. The Davidson County Sheriff’s Office confirmed Thursday it has released 283 inmates to ICE custody in 2025, notably higher than last year’s number.

Oddly enough, the sheriff’s office doesn’t have information on whether those inmates have legal documentation to be in the country. It sends fingerprints collected in the booking process to national databases, including those ICE is able to access, according to spokesman Jon Adams.

ICE contacts the sheriff’s office to request a detainer, then picks up the inmate, leaving the local agency with nothing but a number of people released to federal custody.

Based on the 283 inmates released by the Davidson County Sheriff’s Office to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Metro Nashville appears to be cooperating with the federal agency on deportation, despite claims to the contrary by Republican lawmakers.

The Davidson County Sheriff’s Office hasn’t participated in the 287(g) screening program for immigrant inmates since 2012 when Sheriff Daron Hall said it was so successful it was no longer needed. For the five years the department used the program, it processed more than 10,000 undocumented immigrants for removal from the country, according to a WPLN report.

But based on the jail pickups, Metro Nashville appears to be cooperating with the feds, even though Republican lawmakers are hammering at Democratic Mayor Freddie O’Connell after he raised concerns about the Nashville sweep. Metro inadvertently posted the names of three ICE agents, then removed them, and O’Connell updated a years-old executive order requiring personnel to notify the mayor’s office if they encounter any federal agents, including those from ICE. Those moves spurred Republican legislation to punish governments that ID ICE agents, and GOP leaders have called on O’Connell to rescind the notification order.

Since opting out of the program, the sheriff’s office no longer serves as an extension of the federal ICE program. But based on the number of jail deportations, they have quite a few encounters with the federal agents.

Republican leaders have said repeatedly over the last few months that new laws are needed to remove undocumented criminals who pose a public safety threat.

Those have been under way, though, for nearly two decades.

Former President Barack Obama removed more than 4 million people, earning him the moniker “deporter in chief.” Former President Joe Biden deported 271,000 immigrants in 2024, according to a BBC report. Over the first four months of this year, the Trump administration removed about 200,000 people from the country.

Based on those numbers, undocumented immigration is nothing new, and neither are deportations. Some just cause more chaos than others.

Trying to get off the radar

Tennessee State University broke ground Thursday on two academic buildings for the College of Agriculture, but the historically Black college will remain under a state microscope for a good minute.

As part of an agreement signed last week with state leaders, the university must meet several financial requirements in order to shift more than $90 million from a 2022 capital grant to campus operations over the next three years.

In addition to making a quarterly report to the Tennessee Board of Regents, comptroller and commissioner of Finance and Administration, TSU must meet deficit reduction goals and cut yearly expenses, fix state audit findings, come up with a space use and real property plan, and set find an enrollment figure it can handle without going broke.

State officials reached the agreement with TSU and interim President Dwayne Tucker after forcing out former President Glenda Glover and replacing the board of trustees in 2024.

TSU and Glover caught the ire of Republican senators when the university sought last-second approval to lease apartments for student housing when it started an aggressive scholarship program after the COVID pandemic. The university used a federal grant to fund the scholarships, then ran out of money.

In the last year, state leaders have been micromanaging the university’s money with Tucker, who is working without pay, to put TSU on stronger financial footing.

The estimated $90 million buildings for the Food and Animal Sciences and Environmental Sciences programs will support the university’s academic, research and agriculture extension missions.

“This project underscores the state’s continued confidence in our university and the strength of our land-grant mission,” Tucker said in a statement.

“The hard work starts now,” state Comptroller Jason Mumpower recently told Dwayne Tucker, interim president of Tennessee State University. (Photo: John Partipilo/Tennessee Lookout 2024)

Republican senators have said consistently they want TSU to succeed, yet they didn’t show any confidence in the administration until recent months. State officials allowed TSU to take an advance last fall on the $250 million in capital funding, just to make payroll and stay afloat.

A state study found TSU had been shorted by as much as $500 million over many decades, while a federal report said the university was shorted by more than $2 billion, a figure Republicans are rejecting. Either way, TSU has battled with finances for years, struggling to balance the books and resolve audit findings, even if state investigations found no wrongdoing.

State Comptroller Jason Mumpower, one of Glover’s biggest critics, said he has confidence in Tucker. After the recent signing of a memorandum of understanding, Mumpower said he told the interim president that “the hard work starts now.”

The question is whether they can repair decades of underfunding, bad management and, some might say, neglect on the part of a lot of people in high positions.

Cepicky’s pick

Republican state Rep. Scott Cepicky said on a podcast this week he’s picking House Speaker Cameron Sexton to win the 7th Congressional District seat expected to be vacated by U.S. Rep. Mark Green.

“The wild card here is Sexton,” Cepicky said on “3 Dudes with a View,” a Columbia production. He added that his “gut feeling” is Sexton will win if he gets in.

Sexton’s office has consistently declined comment, but he is set to make a big announcement in August.

For the second time, Green announced his decision to leave the post, once Congress votes on the president’s budget plan.

Cepicky declined to comment Thursday to the Lookout on whether Sexton told him he will run for the post.

The prediction is tempered somewhat because Cepicky also said Sen. Bill Powers could be a strong candidate, even though Powers announced last week he won’t run.

While Sexton’s potential candidacy is bandied about, former Tennessee General Services Commission Matt Van Epps announced this week that Nashville car dealership magnate Lee Beaman and his wife, Julie, will be finance co-chairs for his 7th District campaign.

Beaman also served as treasurer of U.S. Rep. Andy Ogles’ first campaign when he was late filing his Federal Election Commission report and reported raising much less money than he initially claimed. The FBI was investigating him, but Trump squashed that probe when Ogles came to his defense.

Beaman also was the sole donor of $50,000 to Volunteers for Freedom PAC, which put $24,000 into an ad buy backing Ogles, raising questions about illegal coordination between the campaign and PAC.

AI argument

State Sen. Bo Watson joined Republican lawmakers from across the country Thursday in urging Congress not to approve a 10-year moratorium on artificial intelligence laws as part of the president’s budget bill.

Watson, chair of the Senate finance committee, adamantly opposes a ban on states and local governments regulating artificial intelligence systems, models and decision systems for children’s online safety, consumer protections, transparency and accountability measures and “generative AI harms,” which could build up societal biases in data and potentially allow sensitive personal data to be stolen. (This is making my brain hurt.)

Watson invoked Tennessee’s new law preventing “deep fakes” and the ELVIS Act, which protects artists from infringement on their voices and images, during a Thursday webinar on the subject with lawmakers nationwide who oppose the federal ban. The moratorium would withhold broadband funding in exchange for doing nothing.

“For an administration who has really been focused on returning authority back to the states, this is one aspect of this piece of legislation that I’m quite disappointed in,” said Watson, a member of the state’s council overseeing AI policy.

Watson, a Hixson Republican, added that Congress is so slow to act that by the time it deals with problems stemming from AI, the states will be left to “wrestle” with the consequences.

“That’s why it’s critically important that this part of the bill be removed,” Watson said, and states be allowed to work with the feds on AI laws.

It might not be the only rough part of the federal legislation.

Congress also is considering cutting Medicaid spending that could cause Tennessee’s TennCare program to lose $16 billion in federal funding, according to U.S. Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina, brother of former Tennessee state Rep. Rick Tillis.

The pending and potential budget buster for Tennessee is accompanied by a massive uptick in national spending for ICE and border patrol and an overall increase that even former DOGE director Elon Musk opposes.

This proposed expansion of federal control over AI coincides with U.S. deportation efforts nationwide despite opposition in many states, renewing the age-old states’ rights argument that was supposedly put to rest 160 years ago. Some folks want the states to prevail only when it’s politically expedient, presenting a bit of a contradiction.

“Got in a little hometown jam / So they put a rifle in my hand / Sent me off to a foreign land / To go and kill the yellow man.” *

*”Born in the USA,” Bruce Springsteen