Grassroots Memphis food pantry reports spike in need as federal agents flood city

This story has been republished with permission from Tennessee Lookout. Read the original story here.

A mother with a 4-week-old baby sent a request for help to the hotline for a grassroots Memphis food pantry focused on serving immigrant families. Her plea reached Jessica Miller, a volunteer and spokesperson for The Collective Good Immigrant Pantry.

“She had been having to feed (the baby) sugar water for two days because she didn’t have any formula and the husband had gotten deported,” Miller said. “So we delivered formula and diapers.”

The pantry — run completely by volunteers out of garages and spare rooms — is ramping up its operations to meet surging needs as federal law enforcement agencies patrol the city as part of the Trump administration’s “Memphis Safe Task Force.”

The Collective Good collects and delivers boxes of food and hygiene essentials to families in need. This can include families in financial distress after a primary provider was detained or deported, or those who are afraid to leave their homes to get groceries.

“There’s so many situations we run into with people … the husband’s been deported, the person that provided for them, right? And then the mom is there with kids that are hungry and they don’t know what to do,” Miller said.

The pantry has also helped immigrant families who have decided to leave the U.S. out of fear, but cannot easily do so because their children are American citizens.

“The children need passports and paperwork,” she said. “It’s not as easy as people think to deport American citizens to another country.”

The pantry, part of the mutual aid arm of progressive organizing group Indivisible Memphis, launched its hotline in July following a string of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations in primarily Hispanic neighborhoods, Miller said. A group of concerned advocates saw that “food was going to be a big need” for those who remained. 

From July until the task force’s arrival on Sept. 29, the pantry averaged a little over eight deliveries per week, meeting all requests submitted through the hotline. Last week, the pantry made 22 deliveries. At least 100 requests had poured in as of Oct. 8.

Of the requests received, at least half have come from families with babies in need of formula and diapers.

A local church recently hosted a “baby shower” for the pantry, collecting baby essentials to help the pantry meet growing needs. 

“Politics aside, I don’t know how anybody can look at … babies crying with hunger pain and not think that needs help, or that something’s wrong with that,” Miller said.

Federal task force tallies 562 arrests; exact charges are unclear

U.S. Attorney General Pamela Bondi reported the task force made 562 total arrests and seized 144 illegal guns as of Thursday, before the arrival of National Guard troops on Friday. The U.S. Department of Justice did not respond to a request for further information about the charges related to those arrests.

Lead organizers for Free the 901, a coalition of Memphis advocacy groups steering response to the federal task force, say they have received hundreds of reports from community members of federal law enforcement agents from multiple agencies working alongside Tennessee Highway Patrol officers to conduct traffic stops throughout the city, particularly in areas with high concentrations of minority residents. 

Tennessee Lookout independently observed several traffic stops on Tuesday evening where agents wearing gear marked as FBI, U.S. Marshalls, Homeland Security Investigations and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives were present alongside THP officers. 

THP did not respond by the time of publication  to requests for traffic stop data, and it’s unclear how many of the 562 arrests reported by the task force may have resulted from these traffic stops.

Information released to Tennessee Lookout by the Department of Justice on Oct. 7 indicated that roughly 24% of the 386 arrests to that point were done on “administrative ICE warrants.” These warrants are issued by ICE officers to remove non-citizens from the United States, according to Federal Law Enforcement Training Center (FLETC) materials.

Administrative ICE warrants are not criminal warrants, are not signed by a judge or magistrate, and cannot be used to enter private areas such as individuals’ homes. While the “underlying basis for a non-citizen’s removability may be due to some criminal violation,” FLETC Senior Legal Instructor John Seaman stated in a training transcript, an administrative ICE warrant only indicates that an ICE official determined a person is “removable from the United States.”

The arrest data from Oct. 7 also indicated that 63 arrests were for “other” purposes and 125 were for “warrants,” with no additional information on the type of offense. Of the 386 arrests, two were for homicide charges, two were related to probation or parole, 20 were for sex offenses, 30 for narcotics and 50 for firearms-related charges.

Not a typical food bank

Miller describes the Collective Good Immigrant Pantry as a “true mutual aid network operating differently than traditional food banks, which sometimes require paperwork or identification.

The volunteers who started the pantry consulted with leaders in the Latino community to ensure that pantry boxes contain familiar ingredients and spices.

“We did this to fit the Latino community,” she said. “The systems that have failed us aren’t going to be the answer to this, so we decided that we’re going to be the answer for it.”

The pantry collects donations of nonperishable foods and hygiene items through its Amazon wishlist, and accepts cash donations to ensure that each delivery also contains fresh dairy, meat and produce. 

Volunteers try to pack the boxes with enough food to feed families for a week. They also include items like coffee and lotion, because “we recognize that even though they’re going through the most traumatic time of their life, they still deserve some happy in their life, too,” Miller said.

Families in need reach out to the pantry’s hotline and provide details on the numbers of adults and children needing food, as well as any allergies. Volunteers then deliver the boxes directly. 

Along with meeting emergent needs, the pantry connects families with longer-term resources offered by other advocacy groups. 

When requests for help shot up, the small group of original pantry volunteers began to get overwhelmed and burnt out, Miller said, but then about 120 people from all over Shelby and surrounding counties answered a call for new volunteers.

“Every week I go into the new week praying that we’ll be able to help more people,” she said. “And sometimes it gets to the point where we’re a little low on funds or low on supplies, but it’s always provided so far.”

Miller said she looks forward to the day when the food bank initiative is not needed, but until that point, her goal is for “our voices to be louder than the ones saying this (federal task force) is what our city needs to make it better.”