CHATTANOOGA, Tenn. (CN) — Stephanie Teatro recalls the April day when federal helicopters circled over a meatpacking plant in Grainger County, Tennessee and Immigration and Customs Enforcement conducted its biggest workplace raid in years.
“That really signaled the return to these mass worksite enforcement operations, and Tennessee was the site of the first one,” said Teatro, co-director of the Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition.
While detention centers and the Mexican border sit at the white-hot center of the immigration debate, communities in the American heartland also are seeing a change of tone from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE.
And though Tennessee recently enacted a law that requires local law enforcement to assist in immigration enforcement, immigrant advocates say tough enforcement will hurt the state’s economy.
“We have heard from many small business owners that when there are policy changes or rumors of ICE activity in a community, their businesses suffer because so many families are too afraid to leave their homes or drive,” Teatro wrote.
According to a study by The Partnership for a New American Economy, if 10 percent of Tennessee’s 132,000 undocumented immigrants left the state, Tennessee would lose $21 million in state and federal taxes and $588 million from its Gross Domestic Product.
The St. Louis Federal Reserve estimated Tennessee’s 2017 GDP at $345 billion.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions in May commended the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Tennessee for tripling its prosecutions of illegal re-entry.
In Session’s prepared remarks, he told law enforcement officers:, “You may not be on the front lines on this — you may not be on the border — but you have prosecutorial responsibilities to enforce our immigration laws. … That’s great work and I want to thank you for that.”
While officials from the 11 districts that attended the conference in Gatlinburg increased their prosecution of illegal re-entry by 56 percent from fiscal year 2016 to 2017, the U.S Attorney’s Office in eastern Tennessee prosecuted 12 people in fiscal year 2016 for illegal re-entry and 35 in 2017. All the defendants pleaded guilty, according to the office spokeswoman Sharry Dedman-Beard.
Acting director of ICE Thomas Homan, who retired this year, ordered the agency last year to quadruple its number of workplace raids — a directive that extends nationwide.
ICE works in districts, and according to ICE spokesman Bryan Cox does not have data on how many arrests it makes per state, but tracks data by field office.
Tennessee falls under the purview of the ICE field office in New Orleans, which in the first two quarters of fiscal year 2018 arrested 5,049 people, 60 percent of which it says are “convicted criminal aliens.”
Three years ago, in FY 2015, the New Orleans ICE field office arrested 5,244 people, 84 percent of whom it says were convicted of a crime. In FY 2013, under the Obama administration, the New Orleans field office made 9,115 arrests, 70 percent of whom allegedly were convicted of a crime.