Jesus Freakin Congress@TheJFreakinC
🚨BREAKING: ICE and Tennessee state police have been illegally using traffic stops as an excuse to check immigration status.
The Fourth Amendment requires probable cause. You don’t get to pull people over just because you think they might be immigrants.
But that’s exactly what happened.
Troopers used minor excuses… bent plates, window tint, temporary tags… not to enforce traffic laws, but to hand people over to ICE.
In many cases, they ignored actual violations just to keep the stop going long enough for ICE to step in.
That’s called a pretextual stop, and when it’s based on race or ethnicity, it crosses into a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment… meaning the government cannot target people differently based on race.
And the evidence…
Officers were recorded saying things like, “They’re definitely not English speakers,” while choosing who to stop, while entire neighborhoods with large Latino populations were targeted.
That’s racial profiling.
Then there’s due process…
The Fifth Amendment guarantees that people… citizens and non-citizens…cannot be deprived of liberty without fair legal procedures.
But people were detained, processed, and deported through a pipeline designed to move fast, not fairly. Even those who were legally in the U.S., like asylum seeker, were still arrested and deported.
One man was labeled a gang member, because of tattoos…
And he was deported.
But it gets worse.
ICE cannot legally conduct routine traffic stops… So. they partnered with state troopers to get around that limitation.
In other words… they used local police as a loophole.
Meanwhile, these operations didn’t just violate rights… they made communities more dangerous.
In Memphis, after similar deployments, high-speed chases increased by over 400%. One chase, which started over headlights, ended with a crash involving a woman and an infant.
AND the same federal agents tied to this operation have already led to wrongful arrests, chaos in multiple states, and even U.S. citizens being detained.
It’s bad enough for federal agents to violate the constitution, but when you add in state power…
The constitution starts becoming optional.