This story was updated on May 27, 2025, with the correct spelling of Tyré Nichols name.
When a group of immigrant rights advocates walked through Cooper-Young on April 15 to protest a new state law, Memphis police responded by driving their vehicles into the crowd, sometimes coming within inches of marchers.
Sirens blared in Spanish and English, saying, “You must leave the immediate vicinity,” and threatening, “You may be arrested.”
The law the marchers spoke out against will require local law enforcement, such as the Memphis Police Department, to cooperate with federal immigration authorities. It goes into effect July 1 and has stoked the fear and distrust many immigrants experience toward the state.
Police later told MLK50, “Officers were attempting to get pedestrians out of the street for their safety since this was an unpermitted event.” No arrests were made.
But to the marchers and observers, it felt like an unusually aggressive response. The police were making the situation unsafe by driving into a large crowd that included children in strollers.
And, it seemed to immigrants and their supporters that some of the fears raised by the new law were validated: That immigrants are being targeted.
But now, after a meeting with Memphis Mayor Paul Young and Interim Police Chief Cerelyn “CJ” Davis, some of those same immigrant rights advocates say they are “hopeful” that Young’s administration will listen to their concerns and that the state law won’t be used to target immigrants, at least not in Memphis.
‘We could be divided by laws like this‘
Gabby Salinas, a candidate for Tennessee House 96, moved to the United States from Bolivia as a 7-year-old for cancer treatment. She said she had never seen anything like the police response to the march.
The immigrant community is already apprehensive about law enforcement, she said, and can become targets of crime because people know immigrants often carry cash and are less likely to report crimes to the police.
This new state law likely will exacerbate that issue, Salinas said. Immigrants fear racial profiling and that even minor interactions with law enforcement will lead to being turned over to federal immigration authorities.
The new law requires law enforcement to “communicate with the appropriate federal official regarding the immigration status of any individual…”
It also requires local agencies “cooperate with the appropriate federal official in the identification, apprehension, detention or removal” of immigrants not lawfully present in the United States.
Sandra Pita, who joined the march, described similar worries, including her fear that loved ones will be separated in mixed-status families like her own.
“I don’t know what’s going to happen after this law,” Pita said. “We did this march not just because it was my family who will be affected, it’s a lot of families in Memphis. That’s why the march had so many kids, the older generation of people, because they’re trying to say the same thing. They’re trying to say this is my family, and we could be divided by laws like this.”
Misael Gonzalez, another marcher who spoke with MLK50 through a translator, also said the law will impact his family. He recalled how a relative was pulled over in Collierville and turned in to federal immigration authorities three years ago, even though he had three children in the United States. That could happen even more under this new state law, he said.
Studies support concerns about how local police cooperation with federal authorities harms immigrants.
In one study of California immigrants in 2018, researchers found that direct encounters with law enforcement were “associated with immigrants’ avoidance of public benefits due to public charge concerns.”
And a study by the University of Illinois at Chicago found that Latinos — both citizens and noncitizens — are “less likely to volunteer information about crimes because they fear getting caught in the web of immigration enforcement themselves or bringing unwanted attention to their family or friends.”
MPD distances from ICE, but concerns remain
The history of the Memphis Police Department’s collaboration with federal immigration authorities has been, at times, murky.
That’s even though leaders in Memphis have long been aware of the negative impacts of law enforcement collaborating with federal immigration enforcement.
In the Reimagine Policing report, written by an advisory council created by former Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland in 2020, one action item recommended that Memphis “decouple federal immigration enforcement from routine local policing for civil enforcement and non-serious crime.”
The action item noted that “The Memphis Police Department does not participate in federal immigration enforcement activities and only contacts U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Services on drug or other criminal charges involving moral turpitude and or a felony.”
In response to questions from MLK50 about how the department will respond to the new state law, MPD said the law “is not in effect now; therefore we will not comment.”
Their current policy has not changed and “stands for itself,” the department said.
But some say they have observed collaboration anyway.
Hunter Demster, a long-time organizer in Memphis, said he and others have witnessed Memphis Police officers parked just a block away from a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement operation.
“There is 100% a collaboration between them,” Demster said. “I have no doubt that’s a big part of why Manuel Duran spent over a year in an ICE detention facility.”
Duran’s arrest, first by Memphis police and then later by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, drew intense scrutiny of the two agencies. Duran, a Memphis Spanish-language reporter, was arrested by MPD at a 2018 immigration protest. While local prosecutors dropped charges, ICE then arrested him. He remained behind bars for 465 days, according to MLK50, winning his political asylum case in 2022. A lawsuit filed in 2019 alleged that Duran’s arrest came “in retaliation for his reporting that was critical of MPD and Shelby County Sheriff’s Department law enforcement towards and treatment of Latino and immigrant residents.”
The Commercial Appeal also reported in 2019 that Memphis police officials “worked behind the scenes with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement through a local gang unit.”
“Over and over again, MPD was working with ICE,” Demster said.
As for the march last month, Demster said he had “never experienced that level of aggressive and ignorant policing at a protest.”
A commitment from the mayor
Young has expressed a desire to make Memphis’ immigrant community feel included and safe in the city, holding a bilingual town hall and making other efforts at inclusion.
Now, he and Davis have made a commitment to a group of immigrant rights advocates that Memphis will not target immigrants because of the new state law.
During last month’s march, as police drove their vehicles into the crowd, Maria Oceja sent a text to Young. Oceja had served on the “good governance” committee for Young’s transition team, building a relationship with the new mayor.
After that, marchers believe, police began to de-escalate. But the damage had already been done, with marchers afraid of being hit by police cars and ears ringing from the sirens. In one instance, a child fell out of their stroller as police drove into the crowd, according to Pita, who said marchers were able to help pick up the child.
“It was traumatizing,” said Pita, whose family immigrated to the United States from Mexico when she was 5. “I would understand that they were trying to protect us if they did it different, if they didn’t come up with that aggression with their cars in the middle of the people.”
After the march, advocates sent a letter to Young. The letter asked for “an immediate investigation” from Young, that Davis issue a public apology and that Young and Davis meet with organizers “to address the department’s unnecessarily violent behavior.”
That meeting occurred May 15, with both city leaders sitting down with five immigrant rights advocates, including Oceja and Pita.
The group made three demands: that Young hold a press conference with local Hispanic and Latinx media to share how his administration will enforce the new state law, that he ensure Davis “leads her officers to not be intimidating towards the Hispanic/Latinx community” and that Young meet again with the group to consider additional needs of the immigrant community.
Young said his legal team had to research the new state law, but seemed open to the ideas presented, they said.
In an interview with MLK50, Young said his administration will continue to follow its current policy with regard to immigrants and that “our policies already align with the spirit of this [new] law, so our practices won’t dramatically change.”
The policy, available online, says all people deserve “full protection of the law” and that federal immigration authorities should only be contacted if an undocumented immigrant is arrested “on any drug or other criminal charges involving moral turpitude and/or a felony.” If the immigrant is arrested on less serious charges, federal authorities should not be contacted, according to the policy.
“Our message to (immigrants) is we certainly are not targeting their community,” Young said. “We don’t want them to stop calling in crimes or activities, particularly if they are victims of crime. We want them to feel protected.”
But while Davis and Young have agreed to hold to MPD’s current policy in line with what they believe to be the “spirit” of the new law, some advocates fear individual officers might instead hold to the letter of the law, seeing it as a license to turn any immigrant over to federal authorities. At times, Davis’ statements to the public have contradicted other information, particularly regarding police reform ordinances passed by the City Council in the wake of Tyré Nichols’ death.
In the meeting, Davis seemed “unaware” of some of her officers’ actions, said Arturo Colunga, who also attended. Colunga gave Davis the details of a hit-and-run in which police denied medical attention to a victim because she didn’t speak English. Davis, he said, “seemed like she cared.”
“I’m prayerful that they’re gonna follow through,” Colunga said. “It seemed like they were.”
Both hope and caution
While serving on Young’s transition team, Oceja and the rest of the “good governance” committee recommended he maintain a government structure always willing to listen.
Now, she said she believes he is embodying that recommendation, a “complete difference from what we’ve known in the last administration.”
Although the meeting with Young and Davis was grounds for optimism, the group still fears for themselves, their families and their communities when the new law is implemented.
For Colunga, it brings back memories of living in Maricopa County, Arizona, where he was “targeted and profiled” because of his ethnicity “on a daily basis.”
The march last month was not directed at the City of Memphis, but rather was intended to send a message to Gov. Bill Lee about his signing of the bill, Oceja said. But, when the City of Memphis responded through its police force, “they became the folks we needed to talk to.”
Now, Oceja said she doesn’t foresee the mayor shutting doors to the community. At the same time, Memphis’ immigrant community is cautious.
‘’I think the caution on behalf of the community is, despite the new leadership and support we’re getting from the new administration, we know that policing agencies have a specific role of monitoring community members, especially in Memphis,” Oceja said. “I think the worry is (whether) these agencies, despite the mandate from Mayor Young or Chief Davis, will have an accountability process if an officer were to try to do the work of ICE.”
Katherine Burgess is the government accountability reporter for MLK50: Justice Through Journalism. Contact her at katherine.burgess@mlk50.com
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